Take-Two boss believes MMO does not work in the US – Gaming news
Take-Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick considers massively-multiplayer online (MMO) games to be generally unprofitable in the US.
While talking at the Cowen Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in New York on May 30, the head of the publisher that brought us gems such as the Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne said that the genre has undoubtedly grown immensely popular across the globe,
but it has failed to make a solid impact in the US as compared to other regions such as Asia.
He admitted that his company is investing actively in MMOs, but they are not doing this to target the gamers in America because they know for a fact that irrespective of their efforts, the gamers in the region will not show a great deal of enthusiasm upon
coming across belong to his particular genre.
Zelnick went on to add that so far, only two MMOs have been able to successfully gain footing in the region, namely Blizzard’s World of WarCraft and Sony Online Entertainment’s EverQuest.
The Two-Two head pointed out that despite its success with the World of WarCraft, Blizzard Entertainment had recently announced an overhaul of its new MMO Titan, thus highlighting the uncertainty that surrounds the genre and its potential to make an impact
in the region.
Keeping all these things mind, Take-Two made the decision to invest in MMO outside of the US. It has already teamed-up with Tencent for the NBA 2K Online project, whereas Civilization MMO is another project that it is working on. Both the games will be targeting
the Asian region.
“We've stayed away from that market and instead we went to Asia where at any given time ten or twenty are successful in China generating lots of revenue,” Zelnick said. “And we figured, we don't really know China very well, so we partnered with the best
company in China: Tencent. They taught us the business, we taught them something about sports game development and we've launched NBA 2K Online with virtually no economic risk and a straight shot to the upside.”
While Take-Two has made its stance clear on MMO and the US market, it is difficult to say if other publishers have similar opinion about the region and the potential market of the genre in the region.
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