Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has made his position on generative AI clear — and it is not the position the market apparently expected. Speaking in an interview with The Game Business, Zelnick said that Wall Street fundamentally misreads how the games industry actually works. He isn’t worried. Not even a little.
Zelnick was responding to a specific question: could tools like Google’s Project Genie eventually level the playing field for smaller developers competing against titles like GTA 6? His answer was immediate. “Not even the littlest bit,” he said. “There’s already plenty of technology out there that allow people to create video games, and as a result, thousands of video games are created every year, and yet the hits all cluster among the large entertainment companies, almost entirely.”
What Zelnick Actually Said About Generative AI
The core of Zelnick’s argument is a scale problem, not a tools problem. “These tools may help you create assets, but that won’t help you create hits,” he explained. “There are loads of assets out there now. It doesn’t matter if you push a button to create an asset, or it takes you six weeks — at the end of the day, you have an asset. And thousands of mobile games are launched every year, and there are only a handful of hits.”
He extended the argument to the music industry as an analogy: “Right now there are programs that allow you to put out a prompt and get a professionally recorded song spit back out at you. It sounds like a song, but I defy you to listen to it more than once.” Technical production, his point being, is not the same as creative pull. One you can automate. The other, so far, you cannot.
Zelnick did carve out a role for genAI in pre-production — storyboarding, exploring plot directions, early ideation — calling it “more effective than the tools we’ve had before.” But creating polished, mass-market hits like NBA 2K or EA Sports FC “does require human engagement and creativity.” He believes genAI will support the amateur creator economy but won’t displace professional studios. “The notion that somehow new tools would allow an individual to push a button and generate a hit and bring it to many millions of consumers around the world,” he said, “it’s a laughable notion.”
Why This Matters for GTA 6 Fans in Southeast Asia
GTA 6 is one of the most anticipated games in the region — and the wait has not been easy. There have already been delays, leaked footage, and enough noise to make anyone anxious about what is actually happening inside Rockstar. So when the CEO of Take-Two speaks publicly about how his company thinks about game creation, it carries weight.
What Zelnick is saying is that nothing about generative AI is changing how Rockstar builds GTA 6. The team is still doing it the same way they always have: with enormous resources, human creativity at every level, and a scale of detail that no prompt-based tool can replicate. “The ambition of the project hasn’t shifted because ChatGPT learned to write a mission briefing,” as one way to put it.
That is, in practice, reassuring. The version of GTA 6 that SEA players are waiting for is being built exactly as it was always going to be built. Zelnick’s statement doesn’t change a release date. But it does confirm that Take-Two isn’t quietly pivoting to AI shortcuts on their flagship title. For everyone watching the GTA 6 news cycle with one eye open, that matters.
Source: Rock Paper Shotgun
Aisha Rahman | Sports & Gaming Journalist | Based in Kuala Lumpur
