Strauss Zelnick Says Former Rockstar Employees Failed to Match GTA — Take-two Interactive
Take-two interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick said former Rockstar employees have tried and failed to match Grand Theft Auto’s scale. He made the case during the TD Cowen 54th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom conference call, as Grand Theft Auto 5 keeps selling 5 million games per quarter and GTA Online keeps getting quality-of-life updates.
Zelnick’s GTA benchmark
“Lots of other people have tried. Lots and lots, including former Rockstar employees. So far, they haven’t been able to do it. Doesn’t mean they can’t in the future, by the way. We’re always running scared. But it won’t be technology that changes the game. That won’t be the change. What’ll change is that some extraordinarily creative individual or individuals will show up and do something astonishing. Our goal is to get those people to work within the Take-Two system. If we fail to do that, we fail,” Zelnick said during the call.
The point lands harder because GTA 6 is planned for release in November of this year, 13 years after Grand Theft Auto 5 arrived. That gap has not stopped the older title from acting like a live business line, with 5 million games moving each quarter and online updates keeping attention on the franchise between major releases.
Former Rockstar talent
Lots of people have tried to build something at the same scale, and Zelnick said former Rockstar employees are among them. He did not frame the challenge as a software problem. He framed it as a talent problem, saying the next breakthrough will come from “some extraordinarily creative individual or individuals” rather than from technology.
That leaves Take-two interactive with a familiar industry problem: keep the franchise engine running while trying to find the next creator who can operate inside its system. The company has a built-in advantage in GTA’s ongoing sales, but Zelnick’s remarks also make clear that scale alone is not enough if the next big idea develops outside the fold.
Leslie Benzies and MindsEye
Leslie Benzies, the former Rockstar North president who founded Build A Rocket Boy, sits inside the wider conversation because MindsEye is a single-player cinematic action game from his studio. Zelnick’s comments did not target one release, but they did put a sharper label on the broader market: plenty of well-known talent has tried to chase GTA-level results, and none has matched it yet.
For Take-two interactive, the immediate test is not whether Grand Theft Auto 6 arrives in November. It is whether the company can keep the system strong enough to turn the next exceptional idea into a hit that does not depend on GTA’s shadow.
