It’s been over a decade since BioShock Infinite came out, and the studio behind it, Irrational Games, was closed. Then, in 2019, 2K Games announced that a newly formed studio called Cloud Chamber would handle the creation of BioShock 4. Six years later, it’s still MIA. What went wrong?
“I think finding the right creative purchase was hard, as it turns out,” Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently told Game File. “I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends.”
He didn’t go into what exactly those dead ends were, but a Bloomberg report from last summer pointed the finger at the game’s narrative. An internal review had left executives at the company unhappy with the apparent direction and quality of the game, leading to 80 layoffs and a shakeup of Cloud Chamber’s leadership. Rod Fergusson, who had been a closer on BioShock Infinite, was brought in to get things back on track.
Zelnick said he was “deeply disappointed” by the wait for BioShock 4 but suggested these sorts of challenges are just part of the “nature of entertainment,” especially in a hit-driven business like video games.
“The strategy of this company has always been to make the best entertainment, not necessarily the most entertainment,” he told IGN last year. “Of course, sometimes we’ve fallen short, but frankly a precious few times. And I think some of our competitors have realized maybe a little late in the day that consumers are not okay with okay. Good is the new bad, great is the new great. And our goal here is to make everything exceptional.”
Zelnick said he’s “feeling a lot better” about the state of BioShock 4 now, though the game still doesn’t have a release window and seems unlikely to get one anytime soon.