Take-Two targets efficiency to battle rising dev costs

Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two is hoping running its business efficiently will help it battle concerns surrounding rising development costs.

Speaking to investors, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said the company was aiming to be the most efficient in the business, and identified development and marketing spending as areas where the company wanted to be most effective moving forward.

“Historically, as new platforms enable new work are launched, development expenses have indeed gone up,” said Zelnick.

“We’re fortunate that we were also able to take our top-quality titles and deliver strong revenues from those titles and, therefore, deliver profitability.

“So one of the three tenets of our strategic approach here is efficiency, and we aim to be the most efficient company in the business. And that includes development spending. Our goal is to deliver the highest quality titles and sort of market them as effectively, if not more effectively, than anyone else.”

Zelnick has previously said he did not expected development costs for next-gen consoles PS4 and next Xbox to rise significantly, and has said that company has enacted measures to tighten control of its expenditure in recent months.

“We don’t have any reason to believe our development budgets will change significantly,” said Zelnick.

“If anything we have become – group-wide – much tighter in terms of how we spend our money. We can’t say specifically, but no we don’t expect to see a meaningful change in what it costs us to release these top quality products.”