What Take-Two's CEO actually said about GTA 6's delay, budget and AI
We went through the Wall Street Journal's recording of Strauss Zelnick's 4 November interview. He wouldn't confirm a $1 billion budget, called the delay a 'must have' and said Grand Theft Auto is 'handcrafted'. There was no launch news.
Strauss Zelnick, the chief executive of GTA VI’s publisher Take-Two, spent about 23 minutes on stage at WSJ Tech on 4 November. Clips are all over social media, so we went to the full recording. He gave no new launch facts, but he did say more than usual about how the game got here.
The budget: he wouldn’t say
Asked how much the game cost, Zelnick said it “was expensive and it took a long time”. The interviewer then put a number on it, citing estimates of more than a billion dollars and accepting that he wouldn’t give the real figure, and asked how long it would take to earn that back.
He didn’t take the bait. “I never claim success before it occurs,” he said, adding that “arrogance is the enemy of continued success”. He neither confirmed nor denied the billion, so any budget figure you see is still an estimate, not a statement from Take-Two. Rumoured.
The delay: “a must have”
The interviewer asked about the moment last year when Rockstar came back and asked for more time. Zelnick said the timing “was not great”, because Take-Two had held a board retreat ten days earlier.
He said the call came from Rockstar’s business lead, Jennifer Kolbe, whom he has worked with for close to two decades. They know each other well enough, he said, that he can tell an optional request from an essential one. “This was not a nice to have. This was a must have.”
It wasn’t an automatic yes on principle, he added. He has had a similar call about a different project and answered that they were shipping, and he says he was right.
He then pointed to a “very high profile release” of the past few years that shipped and had to be pulled because it didn’t work. He didn’t name the game, and he said he wouldn’t throw competitors under the bus. Some outlets have named it for him. We’d leave that as their guess.
The same story from the other side came out last month. In a Bloomberg report, as covered by Kotaku, Kolbe recalled Zelnick answering the second request with “Please tell me you’re kidding”. The two accounts don’t conflict: Zelnick is describing the decision, and Kolbe his first reaction.
AI: “handcrafted”
This line has had less attention. Asked how Take-Two uses AI in game development, Zelnick said it’s too early to put numbers on it and that players don’t want anything called AI in their games. Then he said: “Grand Theft Auto is handcrafted.”
That isn’t the same as saying no AI tools were used anywhere in making GTA VI. In the same answer he said the company has “hundreds of projects” using new technology, and that machine learning has long been part of the business. He drew no line between the two, and the interviewer moved on.
What he didn’t talk about
In our transcript there’s nothing about a PC version, an unlock time, review dates or an online mode for GTA VI. Those answers, if they come at all, are more likely from Rockstar. The next scheduled chance for Take-Two to say more is its results on 9 November.
Asked at the end to finish the sentence “if GTA 6 accomplishes one thing”, he said it must be “spectacularly entertaining”. On whether it will be, his answer was the same as on the money: “I feel really good about it, but I’ll wait and see.”
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