Take-Two Boss Thinks They Under-Charge Customers for Their Games

It's quarterly and yearly financial report time, that special occasion every year where companies all around the world call their investors and publish the results of a year's worth of their employee's hard work to pass off as their own success. The gaming sector is no different in that regard, and while the bulk of reports generally aren't terribly interested for the layman, sometimes we learn something interesting in these assorted calls and reports.

For example, Take-Two boss and business chad Strauss Zelnick has gone on record as saying he thinks they undersell their games.

"We deliver the highest quality experiences in the business, and we charge much less for them than we believe they are worth to consumers, and then we deliver, typically, an ongoing component that is free. And that is already a great deal of value. Any monetization is of course totally optional."

Of course, calling the content Take-Two offers "free" is a bit of a stretch: both GTA Online and Red Dead Redemption 2, which I have to assume he's thinking of when he talks about offering quality experiences, are rife with microtransactions and opportunities to milk players for every dime to their name. And 2K has certainly not been shy about charging players for DLC expansions, which offer more content -- and in many ways, a tangible edge -- over other players who don't spend on those expansions.

But that wasn't the only interesting thing he said: it seems he's also of the opinion that subscription services, like the kind EA and Microsoft use, are not the future of the gaming industry.

"That's because of the way people consume it, and the price point for owning a title, which is very reasonable and very low, actually, on a per-hour basis... So I think it's unlikely that subscriptions supplant frontline videogame sales as the primary business model."

I have... less to say about that. But I don't like Zelnick very much so I'll just assume this is bad.