Take-Two Interactive, and its subsidiaries Rockstar Games and 2K Games tend to take their time with releases. Annual sports titles like NBA 2K aside, Take-Two titles like Borderlands 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have spent seven, eight years in development. Definitely not typical in an industry built on annualized Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed games.

　　Well, in a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says he expects the company’s pokey pace to pick up going forward. The success of GTA Online allowed Take-Two to take it easy for a while, but they’re putting the gas pedal back down as we head into a new generation.

　　I don't see it expanding further. In fact, I would expect in many instances it may compress. […] Our ability to engage with consumers on an ongoing basis has [resulted in] less pressure on getting to market with an all-new title. But we [want to] find that intersection between the time it takes our creators to do the best work in the industry on the one hand, and what the consumer wants. And we believe in resting titles as a great thing. […] But I think eight years [between new Rockstar titles] is probably too long.

　　So, how is Take-Two going to get more games out? Well, with bigger teams, but also with smaller games. It seems the days of Rockstar launching an open-world game in one giant chunk may be coming to an end…

　　It's possible that games may be a bit shorter than they were in certain instances. It's possible that the ability to deliver content on an ongoing basis for a long time after an initial release of a hit would mean that perhaps that initial release wouldn't be as long in terms of number of hours of gameplay as previously had been demanded in a world where that was all you were getting.

　　If you have the time, I suggest checking out the full GamesIndustry interview, as Zelnick covers other interesting topics like backward compatibility in next-gen consoles and games industry unionization.

　　What do you think? Are more frequent, smaller games from developers like Rockstar something you can get on board with? Or is the “giant epic per decade” approach preferable?