If you were hoping Grand Theft Auto 6 would launch day one on Xbox Game Pass, you’re out of luck. Take-Two Interactive execs have been hesitant to launch the company’s games on subscription services on Xbox Game Pass, and that will continue to be the case, according to the CEO’s recent comments.
In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz ahead of the company’s latest financial report, CEO Strauss Zelnick candidly said that while he believes the addition of the Call of Duty franchise will push players to the service for a bit, it won’t affect Take-Two’s release strategy.
“I think that offering a frontline title with a premium price in a subscription service, day and date, will push consumers to that subscription service for at least a period of time,” he said. Zenick continued, “No, it won’t affect our decisions … Because our decisions are rational.”
Take-Two has released some of its legacy titles on Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, but it’s avoided day one launches, and will likely continue to do so. Zelnick has gone on the record saying that subscriptions are good for older titles, but aren’t for players in the same way they are for streaming services. You can consume hundreds of hours of movies or TV in a month, but you can’t do the same for video games. Still, he asserts the company will go where the players are.
Going even further back, Take-Two President Karl Slatoff said in 2020 that “we’re highly skeptical that subscriptions will be the only way or the primary way that interactive entertainment is distributed.”
Overall, the company’s financials were uneventful this quarter. Its net bookings and net revenue grew slightly thanks to games like NBA 2K24, mobile titles, and the longevity of Grand Theft Auto 5, GTA Online, and Red Dead Redemption 2 (which has been the case for years now). Take-Two is coasting along right now with smaller releases until Grand Theft Auto 6, which is still set for a fall 2025 launch, likely becomes one of the biggest video game releases of all time. It also has NBA 2K25, WWE 2K25, Civilization 7, Judas, and Tales from the Shire coming down the pipe.
In other Take-Two news, how’s that Borderlands movie doing? Regardless of critics reviews, which have been scathing, Zelnick said in an interview with IGN to “give the film a chance” and that the box office receipts “wouldn’t have a financial impact on us or on the franchise one way or another.”
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”