Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has reaffirmed 2K Games’ assertion that the reportedly troubled BioShock 4, currently in the works at Cloud Chamber, will make it to release.
The reassurance follows a report from Bloomberg earlier this week which reported that the game had failed a recent internal progress check, with the story specifically being tapped as an aspect that needs reworking, and some of the devs working on it have been reassigned to non-BioShock roles.
Hence why, in an interview around 2K Games’ parent company Take-Two’s latest financial report, IGN asked Zelnick whether BioShock 4 is in danger of being canned. “It’s going to come out. That I can say hand on heart, without question,” the exec responded. “We have had some ups and downs along the way. That is accurate. And we have had changes in studio leadership.”
Zelnick went on to cite living up to the “legacy” left by series creator and current Judas developer Ken Levine, as well as the reputations carved out by its previous entries, as a tough task. “We need to make sure that this experience is true to the BioShock DNA on the one hand, and a massive step forward on the other hand,” he explained.
This was was also, unfortunately, where words began to word. As part of his explanation of why BioShock 4 is taking a while to come out, Zelnick offered the following as the reason game development cycles are getting longer:
I think it’s a reflection of the fact that as entertainment businesses mature, consumers seek quality and everyone realises that the consumer is highly demanding and properly so. The strategy of this company has always been to make the best entertainment, not necessarily the most entertainment. Of course, sometimes we’ve fallen short, but frankly a precious few times. And I think some of our competitors have realized maybe a little late in the day that consumers are not okay with okay. Good is the new bad, great is the new great. And our goal here is to make everything exceptional.
The first bit makes sense regardless of whether you agree with it, given we’re talking about the species that made the three most recent Fast and Furious films highly lucrative ventures. Then, towards the end, Zelnick seems to lose track of what words actually mean, even if those words are inherently subjective in terms of which games they apply to. I can just about stomach “good is the new bad,” given it’s just expressing how games that perceivedly fall short of greatness arguably face a tougher challenge nowadays due to the sheer saturation of “good” games out there.
But what does “great is the new great” mean? I’d get it if he’d just said making a great game is great for business. How can making a great game be the new making a great game? They’re the same thing, surely. Zelnick then goes on to say that Take-Two are aiming to “make everything exceptional”. He’s clearly just run out of superlatives above great, because it’s impossible for “everything” to be “exceptional” by definition.
The use of the word makes sense if he means this specifically in terms of Take-Two’s output in comparison to the rest of the industry, but I think he needs to bite the hyperbole bullet and commit to saying he’s aiming for nothing less than super-mega-fantastic-one-of-a-kind-uber-masterpieces, which will simultaneously not be one-of-a-kind, because all of Take-Two’s games will be like that.
I get that this is just one bit of CEO talk, but verging on breaking the English language maybe conveys how much the industry’s moneyfolks are losing the plot when it comes to the expectations – fuelled by a perceived need to make unfathomable amounts of money for a release not to be a total failure – that they heap upon their own games. By all means aim to make a great game, but if every game’s got to be great because good is bad, how long is it until we’ve burned through the whole dictionary?
