A True GTA Competitor Won't Be Made With AI, Take-Two Boss Says

One of the most talked-about advancements to technology in recent years has been AI and ChatGPT specifically. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has shared his thoughts on the technology, and he doesn't believe it's going to help any other developer make a GTA-killer anytime soon.

Speaking to IGN, Zelnick said it's a "very exciting era" for "new tools" that game developers can use to make games more efficiently. And while something like ChatGPT might have some level of applicability to game development, it won't help one of Rockstar's competitors dethrone GTA so easily.

"It's not going to allow someone to say, 'Please develop the competitor to Grand Theft Auto that's better than Grand Theft Auto', and then they just send it out and ship it digitally and that will be that. People will try, but that won't happen," Zelnick said.

The executive went on to say that ChatGPT is similar to a hand calculator. Decades ago, parents worried that hand calculators would mean children wouldn't need to learn math, but that wasn't the case. "The answer is yes, you still have to learn math, turns out, you absolutely have to learn math, but you have a tool that makes it easier to do. And ChatGPT is the same thing," he said.

Looking at the wider gaming industry, Battlefield publisher Electronic Arts is working on AI technology, and has been for years. In 2018, EA announced Project Atlas, an R&D project with 1,000 people working on it that aims to change how games are made through AI and neural networks. This technology was implemented into the Battlefield series, and it was smart enough to play the game and even play the objective.

In other Take-Two news, the company just announced that GTA 5 has passed 175 million in sales, with Red Dead Redemption II surpassing 50 million. Additionally, the company confirmed that BioShock creator Ken Levine's new game, Judas, will be released by the end of March 2025. One of Take-Two's major upcoming games is Grand Theft Auto 6, which leaked in September.