Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is just around the corner. This highly anticipated FPS title is set to be released on October 25, 2024, on PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One, Series X/S, and Windows.
Now it will be a treat for Xbox fans, as Activision has already confirmed that the upcoming title will be a day-one Game Pass release. However, not everyone liked this decision.
Take-Two CEO Criticises the Decision to Launch Call of Duty: Black Ops on Xbox Game Pass Day One
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is going to be the first title in the long-hailed franchise to surface in the Game Pass. Since the Activision-Microsoft merger deal, everyone has waited for this day to come. But Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick is surely not one of them.
Talking to GamesIndustry.biz recently, Zelnick stated the idea of bringing such a huge title on day one of Game Pass is irrational. Take-Two has previously contributed to Xbox’s subscription service by adding legacy titles, yet the company doesn’t seem to be a big fan of adding brand-new AAA titles to it. He also stated that there will be no changes in Take-Two’s stances, no matter what Microsoft is doing:
No, it won’t affect our decisions. Because our decisions are rational.
However, he still thinks that offering a premium title in a subscription service like Game Pass that too day and date will “push consumers to that subscription service for at least a period of time.”
In 2022, he told the interviewing company that bringing AAA titles on day one of subscription services doesn’t make any sense to his company. As per him, Take-Two can’t afford to turn its business upside down; that doesn’t make sense economically.
Zelnick Talks About Take-Two
After the latest financial result of Take-Two, it was seen that there was some modest growth during Q1. Still, it was a quiet year for the GTA-famed company as core properties like GTA Online and NBA 2K failed to deliver as per their expectations.
Zelnick’s company has so far conducted three different sets of cost reductions in the last one and a half years; some of them were related to its $12.7 billion acquisition of Zynga, and some of them were due to the post-pandemic suffering.
One of these harder cost-cutting measures was laying off members of the publishing team of the Private Division label and closing internal Private Division studios like Roll7 and Intercept games. Regarding this, this is what the CEO had to say:
We have narrowed down the pipeline to focus on the titles that we think will be the most successful.
The company is now looking at GTA 6 to improve its financial report next time. Their biggest challenge will be making the transition of players from older generation consoles to newer generation consoles, as a lot of them are still playing the company’s title on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but GTA 6 is set to be launched only on modern consoles. Although the CEO refused to accept this transition as a challenge.
What’s your take on Zelnick’s comments on bringing the upcoming Activision title on Game Pass day one? Let us know your views in the comment section.
