Mafia: The Old Country did better than Take-Two expected, now please do more “contained” story romps at decent prices

Amid announcing another GTA 6 delay during their latest earnings call, Take-Two also raised a glass to comparatively less earth-shatteringly huge crime committer Mafia: The Old Country. As it turns out, there’s enough of an appetite for more “contained” tales sold at a lower price point than the usual all-singing, all-dancing affairs big publishers keep pushing more and more of their eggs into the baskets of.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said the Sicilian sojourn convincingly outperformed expectations, putting to be any questions about the series’ future, at least for now. “What we suspected was confirmed,” the exec told The Game Business. “Which is just…if you give consumers a great narrative experience that’s a lot of fun, somewhat contained, and at a fair price, then you can have the perfect result.”

While I’m not sure I’d go too over the top in congratulating Take-Two for taking the unprecedented gamble of, er, not having every game be a massive, unwieldy beast which is expected to deliver the GDP of a decently-sized country just to not be a branded a faliure, it’s nice to see The Old Country’s approach did pay off.

As I said in my review, it’s a path I was glad to see Hangar 13 take, even if in my estimation the short Mafia romp they ended up creating is a bit too by-the-numbers narrative-wise and could maybe have to done more to blend both the old and the new into its pint-sized soup. If you’re prepared to accept caveats like those going in, it’s well worth picking up for a fun weekend or so of chases in old timey cars and people talking about oaths of omerta.

I’d certainly not want every game I played to set its sights on only being the sort of thing The Old Country is, but it’s important that games like it keep on getting made, because there’ll always be a place for them. Here’s hoping Take-Two don’t turn around and forget that the moment they finish their celebratory wine.

Meanwhile, another of the corp’s summer releases, Borderlands 4, didn’t have any beverages cracked open for it. Instead, Zelnick cited it as having faired less well than planned this far, something the company are blaming on the technical issues which plagued its PC version early doors. What that in mind, they expect a game that conformtably had the biggest US launch in its series’ history to pick up going forwards. This industry, man.