Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick has said he’s hopeful BioShock 2 will ”benefit from the brand awareness”, wants to see juicer sales for games like that.
The original ”got a lot of attention” but that didn’t translate into huge sales. With ”four or five titles” hitting big it would ”meaningfully change” Take-Two; Zelnick wants 5 million sales.
”We announced it sold around 3 million units,” Zelnick said to VentureBeat, referring to BioShock. ”I’d like to see a title like that sell 5 million units.”
”That would make the difference for us. If you have four or five titles that are significantly successful, that will meaningfully change our profitability.” Thanks to all the attention the original trip to Rapture got the sequel should perform even better, argues the man.
”BioShock got a lot of attention. Its brand is huge. It won lots of awards. But it wasn’t as huge as a seller. I’m hopeful that BioShock 2 will benefit from the brand awareness, where people will play it even if they didn’t play the original.”
”We are investing heavily in making it bigger and better. We want it to be different enough that people will want to own it,” revealed Zelnick. ”It will have multiplayer capability, where the approach is interesting. The single-player game is a sequel in time to the original story. The multiplayer version is a prequel in terms of its setting. We think it’s innovative.”
We think it’s about time it got here! An MMO from Take-Two doesn’t look in the cards, meaning a Grand Theft Auto Online is just a glorious pipe dream it seems.
”Competing in that market in the U.S. is a real risk. It requires a huge upfront investment. It requires a big marketing push. And there are only two successful MMOs that matter in the U.S. It’s very hard to do.” Maybe Rockstar’s Houser brothers will go for it anyway…
