During a business presentation held in New York on Tuesday, Karl Slatoff, president of Take-Two Interactive, was asked why he didn’t seem to be pushing for annual releases for Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead or any of Rockstar’s other popular franchises. EA does it, Activision does it, everybody’s doin’ it — don’t you want to be cool, Take-Two?
Slatoff’s response was that annual releases can result in “franchise fatigue” and that keeping the appearances of GTA and titles like it a rarity was crucial to their brand’s value. “We don’t intend to change annual strategy because of product fatigue. [Take-Two] creates franchise value and [releases have] to be managed deliberately,” as he put it. “It’s tempting to have continuous releases and milk a franchise as far as you can, [but] we’ve seen that fatigue in other franchises in the games industry. With almost every single franchise for us, the latest release is bigger than the one before.”
That’s all well and good, but when you go three years without hearing so much as a peep about a new sequel, or even a new single-player expansion…..you NEED to tend to that cow or its udders are going to explode. Just saying.
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