Take-Two Interactive (2011-present)
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| Take-Two Interactive (2011-present) | ||||||||||||||||
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 They will take more than two to the power of a million to make a thing go right.
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Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. is an American video game holding company based in New York City founded by Ryan Brant on September 30, 1993.
The company owns three publishing labels: 2K, Rockstar Games, and Private Division. The company's combined portfolio includes franchises such as BioShock, Borderlands, Grand Theft Auto, NBA 2K, and Red Dead. In January 2022, Take-Two announced that they would acquire social game developer Zynga for $12.7 billion.
It is currently the third-largest video game company in the Americas and Europe after Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts.
While they were tolerable in its previous years, since January 2011, following Strauss Zelnick taking over as the Chief Executive Officer, they have become known as the worst company in the entire history.
Why They Never Make a Thing Go Right Anymore
NOTE: While they were tolerable in the previous years, some of the flaws even before Strauss Zelnick took over as the CEO will be mentioned.
- Like Electronic Arts, their 2K sports games are rife with heavy microtransaction abuse, they also approached many studios to milk their franchises and shut them down later.
- Even the two universally acclaimed games Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 couldn't escape from having pay-to-win online modes.
- To put it in perspective the forty hours for Darth Vader in Star Wars Battlefront II was enough for lawsuits, to be able to unlock Dikembe Mutombo in NBA 2K you would need to make the game a sixteen-hour-a-day job up until they turn off the servers, with GTA Online and Red Dead Online having similarly long and frustrating grinds.
- Their microtransactions are nearly as bad as Gameloft's games after Vivendi acquired the aforementioned company.
- They are firmly against modding in their games, contrary to Volition, much like how hateful they are towards their fanbase.
- The most infamous example of this is when they killed the OpenIV modding tool used by Grand Theft Auto IV and V. Thankfully, Rockstar Games brought it back after widespread consumer backlash.
- They threatened legal action against a modder of Red Dead Redemption called "GamingDamned". They even went as far as to find private information about the modder to call not only him but also multiple members of his family. During these calls, they gave no reason as to why they wanted his mods taken down and were also very rude towards them.
- Eventually, they filed a lawsuit against him for $500,000.
- They filed a DMCA takedown, raided the Discord servers, and filed a lawsuit against GTA modders who reverse-engineered the source code for Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, known as re3 and reVC after the games were unofficially ported to systems like the Wii U, the PlayStation Vita, and the Nintendo Switch, although the aforementioned games came out nearly 20 years ago at this point (and were still relevant in the gaming industry thanks to that). That would be like if Bethesda took down source ports of DOOM or Quake and sued the people behind those fanmade source ports.
- As if that wasn't enough, on July 17th of 2021, they also sent mass takedowns for mods of older GTA games that use assets from other games in the series, including GTA: LC (which converts the map and missions from GTA III into Vice City, which has been in development for over 15 years), as well as GTA: Underground (a massive mod for GTA: San Andreas that ports the maps from GTA III, Vice City, and non-GTA games like Bully and Manhunt). They even took down original mods, such as Vice Cry, which was an HD texture mod, and GTA: Miami Vibe, which was a completely original mod made from scratch. This in particular caused longtime GTA modder Silent to lose interest in working on GTA mods and projects.
- The main reason they are against modding is probably because they are unhappy that some modders added online-exclusive content into offline mode instead of buying them, thus causing them to lose profit. They even censor comments that contain the word "mods" posted on the official Rockstar Games YouTube account's videos. Even though it was proved that they were only doing single-player modding, they just decided to obliterate the modding scene.
- They even took down save files that were shared online for GTA games, which aren't hurting their economy in any way, shape, or form.
- As if that's not enough, they also took down an Unreal Engine rendition of GTA San Andreas, which, ironically, was a CGI-rendered video on YouTube. To add the salt to the wound, the animators themselves said that they had no plans of making an Unreal Engine remaster of the game. They later deleted their channel after the video was taken down.
- Another possible reason for taking down mods of old GTA games is so that they don't take the focus away from the remakes/remasters of older games, titled Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, released on November 11. Furthermore, they forced Rockstar to delist the original releases of the older games on digital storefronts starting October 13, possibly so that people can no longer mod them and don't take away any potential revenue from the remastered collection. Sound familiar?
- And that wasn't enough for them, as they once again took a shot at Flat2VR, a mod that gives VR support to not only GTA but also other games made by companies owned by Take-Two, such as Mafia.
- What makes all of this downright hypocritical is that Take-Two used to support modders in the past, as they gave some of their software to the developers of the multiplayer mod Multi Theft Auto, for example, although that was before Strauss Zelnick's era.
- They nearly forced 3D Realms into bankruptcy, following the troubled development of Duke Nukem Forever.
- This showcases how poorly the company tends to treat much smaller studios by not giving them much time and forcing constant changes with the game that the developers are making, and even nearly causing the game to get flat-out canceled, and ever since the entire Duke Nukem Forever fiasco that happened in 1997 and continued until 2011, 3D Realms and Take-Two have never worked with each other ever again, and have put a curse on the studio that completely haunted them to this day.
- They ruined the WWE series by making the games expensive and never dropping the prices for these games.
- They've now destroyed the series with their bugged, glitched, and technically issued-to-oblivion disaster which is WWE 2K20, by splitting with Yuke's and accusing them of not making more than enough money as they were.
- After reluctantly removing paid loot boxes from NBA 2K18, Take-Two tried to convince consumers (which included children) to contact their local government and beg them to allow loot boxes in efforts to exact revenge on Belgium for banning them![1]
- They were responsible for publishing the multiplayer shooter Evolve, which was infamous for its rampant DLC abuse, including (but not limited to) announcing a pre-order bonus before any substantial gameplay was shown. Despite Turtle Rock's efforts to bring the game up to more acceptable standards by making it free-to-play, Take-Two pulled the plug on the game only a month after the fact.
- The company is highly capitalist, firmly believing that trying to obtain a game's rewards by pure gameplay is "under-monetizing" and "giving stuff away for free in perpetuity".[2]
- Their method of abusing microtransactions is nauseating; they allow their games to have agonizingly slow progression systems to prey on players' impatience, all to encourage microtransactions purchases. Even worse is that the company's CEO now gets bonuses based on microtransaction targets. This gives T2 more excuses to pressure players into spending money on these side payments and push even harder for them in future titles, which is a scary thought.
- Even worse than this, as pointed out by Jim Sterling, is their lust for child exploitation through microtransaction abuse and gambling mechanics (such as loot boxes), to the point they are attending seminars to learn on how to get kids addicted to gambling, which is not just UNETHICAL, but straight up ILLEGAL and a complete violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (C.O.P.P.A). The worst part about this is that no one got arrested for this yet, which either means that they easily hide this from the public (in the least worst-case scenario), or they bribe the authorities to turn a blind eye (in the worst-case scenario). In other words, if the second case scenario comes to be true, that is essentially FOUL PLAY.
- In 2022, they acquired Zynga, a video game developer that makes slot machine games.
- They make various empty excuses for having such insidious monetization schemes by calling microtransactions "an unfortunate reality" and attempting to justify throttling progression as "giving players the choice to skip the grind".
- It is worth pointing out that "giving players the choice to skip the grind" doesn't wash when you consider that they're the ones who created such a grind in the first place. For example, in Red Dead Redemption 2's online mode, everything costs ridiculous amounts of money or Gold Bars, and the actual multiplayer matches have such meager payouts, often requiring 10s or even 100s hours of continuous play to get anywhere unless the player pays real money to skip it.
- They even claimed that "all games have virtual currency of some kind", which is a gigantic lie since others don't. Marvel's Spider-Man is a perfect example of this by having a properly paced progression system in which skills are unlocked consistently, and the tokens needed to craft suits and gadget upgrades are easily obtained through gameplay, all without the option to pay real money to skip the process because the game doesn't need to do so.
- The company has also managed to show how they will even profit from dead people (even if it's downright unethical and disrespectful towards said individuals) by having the Deluxe Edition of NBA 2K21 (also known as the Mamba Forever Edition) include the late Kobe Bryant, a former L.A Lakers player, who during the time, was recently deceased along with his daughter Gianna and seven others, in a helicopter crash on January 26, 2020. So, not only will they exploit children to their advantage as if everyone working there is a pedophile, but also profit from dead people, which would mentally affect relatives of a deceased person (in this case, Kobe's family and friends).
- The company's CEO, Strauss Zelnick, is an extremely greedy, disgusting, and downright evil Wall Street executive and dictator, who became the CEO of Take-Two following an investor takeover in 2007, and he is despised by a lot of gamers (especially the Grand Theft Auto fanbase) for his greed and terrible decisions, and can be considered by many as the worst person in the entire gaming industry, and even the equivalent of Satan (excluding on public media like TV, where he somehow has an absurd positive reputation). He has even used the First Amendment to justify their atrocious microtransactions and loot box practices.[3] Yes. He believes that exploiting consumers for profit is "freedom of speech", which doesn't make any sense at all!
- He also cannot take the slightest form of criticism. His attitude to criticism has filtered through to Take-Two and their subsidiaries as well, with 2K going to the extent of not just banning the accounts of anyone providing critiques of the game but hacking their systems to remove any evidence of said issues with the game, in other words: Actual criminal hacking.
- Plus, exploiting consumers is actually not protected by (or violating) the First Amendment, making Zelnick's statement a blatant lie.
- He has coined the infamous idea of charging for next-gen upgrades, as he claims gamers are ready for games to be 70 dollars despite many games lacking in quality.[4]
- Most other major publishers have followed T2's example and charged an extra fee for next-gen upgrades.
- Plus, it is clear that he does not care about the game's quality, but only about the revenue it generates. This has been evident with the release of the Definitive Trilogy of GTA, where he referred to numerous bugs and issues as a 'glitch that has been fixed'. This angered many fans and caused them to harass him on Twitter and lock his account temporarily.
- According to some sources, Take-Two had sent goons to intimidate the Borderlands YouTuber SubMatto (who tends to spread rumors and make speculations on unreleased content) and filed more than 100 false DMCA takedowns on his channel in an attempt to silence him for good.[5] This resulted in #BoycottBorderlands3 trending on Twitter.
- It's also likely that they have sent "private investigators" to try and intimidate the developers of FiveM (essentially an alternative to GTA Online which provides modded lobbies) to abandon their project.[6][7]
- And speaking of #11, the voice actors of Borderlands 3 mocked fans who disagreed with Take-Two's decisions.[8] They also mocked them for disagreeing with their views on what FL4K, one of the four playable characters, should be referred to as.
- They attempted a hostile takeover of Star Theory Games after Star Theory rejected a deal to move to a new studio called "Intercept Games". This caused Star Theory to shut down on March 4, 2020.
- They never give the companies they purchased any time to notify them of delays/cancellations. Before making Star Theory shut down, they forcefully delayed Kerbel Space Program 2 to 2021 without their permission.
- Their E3 2021 panel was heavily panned by the gaming community, with many considering it not only the worst E3 of that year but one of the worst E3s of all time. The panel received backlash due to having an hour-long video talking about diversity and inclusion (which generally speaking isn't necessarily bad to talk about such topics, but it was most likely an effort to pander towards political correctness) when the whole point of the gaming panel was to talk about... well, you know... games!
- They filed trademark disputes with hundreds of companies and organizations that bear the letter R on their logos, or the word "Rockstar" in the title, claiming that they have similarities to Rockstar Games, which is incredibly frivolous and petty.
- They also filed a trademark claim against Hazelight Studios for their game having the title It Takes Two.[9]
- They took down the tweets with the design documents for the original GTA and GTA2, along with the prototype videos by Mike Dailly, one of the founders of DMA Design (A.K.A Rockstar North), even though the games are over 20 years old.
- Because of all of the above reasons, they have been declared by many gamers to be a downright pure evil corporation, arguably even worse than Electronic Arts, as a result of their extremely awful business practices, unethical methods of dealing with consumers and above all, their tyrannical CEO, Strauss Zelnick.
Redeeming Qualities
- Despite T2's excessive executive meddling, their subsidiaries, Rockstar Games, 2K, and Private Division, published very good and well-received games, like the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead series from Rockstar, the BioShock and Borderlands series from 2K, The Outer Worlds, and Hades[10] from Private Division.
- Despite hypocrisy, they are at least honest about the microtransactions in GTA Online.
- They were a tolerable company before 2011 and published lots of great games, most notably the Stronghold series.
Videos
Trivia
- Take-Two owned a 20% stake in Bungie before the studio was acquired by Microsoft.
- In 2008, Electronic Arts almost acquired Take-Two for $2 billion, but T2 refused.
- In 2021, Take-Two almost acquired Codemasters, but EA was the winning bidder.
References
- ↑ https://www.pcgamer.com/2k-asks-players-to-contact-local-government-about-belgian-loot-box-ban/
- ↑ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/take-two-ceo-says-the-company-is-under-monetizing-its-users/
- ↑ https://segmentnext.com/take-two-ceo-look-boxes-are-freedom-of-speech/
- ↑ https://www.eurogamer.net/take-two-ceo-strauss-zelnick-reckons-were-ready-for-usd70-video-games
- ↑ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2k-sent-hired-goons-to-a-youtuber-over-borderlands-3-info-leaks
- ↑ https://www.pcgamer.com/take-two-reportedly-sent-private-investigators-to-modders-home
- ↑ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/gta-5-modders-claim-take-two-sent-private-investigators-to-their-home/
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF3kQ-8_otA
- ↑ https://www.vg247.com/it-takes-two-josef-fares-take-two-copyright
- ↑ Published PlayStation 4/5 and Xbox One/Series X physical versions only. Supergiant Games retained self-publishing the game on the digital versions and the Nintendo Switch physical version.
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