No spike in next-gen dev costs, says Take Two

Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has said that the publisher is preparing an array of next-gen releases, which don’t cost a great deal more to develop than current-gen games.During an investor conference call after Take Two’s latest financials, Zelnick was asked if next-gen titles will require far greater investment to develop. “We don’t have any reason to believe our development budgets will change significantly,” he said. “If anything we have become – group-wide – much tighter in terms of how we spend our money. We can’t say specifically, but no we don’t expect to see a meaningful change in what it costs us to release these top quality products.”Elaborating on the topic of ‘cross-generation’ releases, Zelnick continued: “Navigating this part of the cycle is a challenge and i’m actually really pleased with the way we’ve done it. Obviously we’ve released our major release schedule for the coming period and we’re excited about that. We can’t talk much about next-gen, because we’re not the ones to talk about it first, but rest assured that around here we think as far ahead as we possibly can and everyone’s really excited about the possibilities. And i’m very confident that we’ll navigate the transition when it does occur successfully.”Zelnick also said that the company was looking forward to the release of Bioshock Infinite in March, and that the GTA V delay won’t affect the performance of the title. Looking further forward, he added: “In terms of next-gen, as we all know – first of all nothing’s been announced yet – but assuming the consoles are coming when some of us at least think they are, that’s obviously a very light installed base initially and i’m confident that this company will have an extraordinary array of offerings for next-gen when the time comes.”Zelnick’s comments on development costs could be linked to what we expect from PlayStation 4. Our sources have suggested that the development environment is considered PC-like and more developer-friendly – a potential factor in keeping development costs down.

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