Once again, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zel­nick has made it clear that he does­n’t want brand new games com­ing to sub­scrip­tion ser­vices, like Game Pass. So, GTA fans look­ing for­ward to any future titles launch­ing on the ser­vice from the start, are sim­ply out of luck. Zel­nick­’s views have unchanged–subscription ser­vices make sense for old­er titles, but not brand new ones. This is a point he has been stress­ing for years. He ques­tions if it’s even pos­si­ble for every­one along the chain–developers, pub­lish­ers, and consumers–come out ahead.

“Our views remain unchanged. We think a sub­scrip­tion mod­el can make sense for deep cat­a­log titles. But it does­n’t real­ly make sense for front­line titles. For any busi­ness mod­el to make sense in the enter­tain­ment busi­ness, it has to work for the cre­ators of the enter­tain­ment as well as the con­sumers of the enter­tain­ment. I think cat­a­log can make sense for the pub­lish­ers, it can make sense for the con­sumers who are avid, who real­ly want access to a lot of prod­uct. But if you’re get­ting into front­line prod­uct, then the eco­nom­ics are much more dif­fi­cult to make sense of,” Zel­nick stat­ed dur­ing the Take-Two call.

He observed that “con­sump­tion pat­terns” for a stream­ing ser­vice like Netflix–which offers lin­ear entertainment–differs from inter­ac­tive entertainment.

“Con­sumers who are involved with inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment have dif­fer­ent con­sump­tion pat­terns than those involved with lin­ear enter­tain­ment. Lin­ear enter­tain­ment con­sumers con­sume some­thing like 150 hours of pro­gram­ming a month. That’s prob­a­bly well over 100 dif­fer­ent titles. In the case of inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment, con­sumers are con­sum­ing some­thing like 45 hours a month, and that may be one, two, three, four titles. But it’s cer­tain­ly not 100 titles. So from a con­sumer point of view, it’s not clear that a sub­scrip­tion mod­el real­ly makes sense, for the bulk of con­sumers,” he stated.

How­ev­er, Zel­nick is not com­plete­ly closed off the any one idea.

“That remains to be seen. We’re open mind­ed. We have made cat­a­log titles avail­able for sub­scrip­tion ser­vices. Very occa­sion­al­ly we’ve made front­line titles avail­able as well. But we do see this more as a cat­a­log offer­ing than a front­line offer­ing,” he said.

One exam­ple of this is Rock­star Games Grand Theft Auto V, which made its way to Xbox Game Pass. It was then removed, then made a return, and is now on its sec­ond way out and will be removed from the ser­vice shortly.

You can check out more from Take-Two’s earn­ings report below:

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