The boss of GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive has taken a swipe at subscription services, as he comments on whether Call Of Duty’s arrival on Xbox Game Pass could change consumer habits.
While there was a time when subscription services were being touted as the future of gaming, recent data shows services like Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus have stagnated in terms of subscriber numbers.
The push to make these services profitable has caused Sony and Microsoft to bump up its prices over the past year. In light of poor console sales, Microsoft especially is trying to drive interest into Xbox Game Pass, having recently made it available through Amazon Fire sticks, and with Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 set to launch on the service day one in October.
Whether Call Of Duty will lead to a significant uptick in subscribers remains to be seen, but Take-Two Interactive boss Strauss Zelnick has said the company, who is the publisher behind GTA 6, still isn’t convinced of the benefits.
Speaking about the launch of Black Ops 6 on Xbox Game Pass, Zelnick said he expects it will drive interest into the service ‘for at least a period of time’.
‘I think that offering a frontline title with a premium price in a subscription service, day and date, will push consumers to that subscription service for at least a period of time,’ Zelnick told GamesIndustry.biz.
However, this push by Microsoft has not changed Take-Two’s views on the subscription model, with Zelnick adding: ‘No, it won’t affect our decisions. Because our decisions are rational.’
Zelnick has previously expressed his sceptism around subscription services, where he described day and date releases as being a ‘lost opportunity for the publisher’.
‘People consume far fewer hours of interactive entertainment in a given month than they do of linear entertainment,’ he said at the time. ‘And within that consumption, there are far fewer titles consumed in interactive entertainment than there are with linear entertainment.’
He added: ‘There probably is a subscription business. It’s a catalogue business. It’s probably best aimed at very avid consumers because those are the consumers who are interested in playing catalogue titles, implying a whole bunch of different titles in a given month.
‘But I don’t think it’s a mass market service that supplants the interactive entertainment business as we know it at all.’
With GTA 6 expected to launch in autumn 2025, it’s highly unlikely then that we’ll see it on Xbox Game Pass or PS Plus day one, unless something miraculous happens over the next year.
Meanwhile, GTA fans have been wildly speculating over when the next GTA 6 trailer will drop, with some believing a new clip hints at October.
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