Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick has once again shared his thoughts on AI in gaming, saying it is “laughable” to believe people can use AI tools to simply “push a button” and make a high-quality, top-selling game.
“The notion that somehow new tools would allow an individual to push a button and generate a hit and bring it to many millions of consumers around the world, it’s a laughable notion,” he told The Game Business. “It’s just never been the case with entertainment. Right now [in music] there are programs that allow you to put out a prompt and get a professionally recorded song spit back out at you. It sounds like a song, but I defy you to listen to it more than once. It’s great to send as a greeting card to your partner on their birthday, but that’s about it.”
Zelnick has said pretty much the same thing on the topic since 2023, so his new comments are not surprising. Previously, he said AI is “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.”
Also in The Game Business interview, Zelnick reiterated that he was “stunned” by how the market reacted to the Google Genie announcement about game-development tools that contributed to gaming stocks, including Take-Two’s, taking a giant nosedive.
He said the Genie technology is not actually a threat to the gaming industry, but instead a benefit. “These tools may help you create assets, but that won’t help you create hits. There are loads of assets out there now. It doesn’t matter if you push a button to create an asset, or it takes you six weeks, at the end of the day, you have an asset. And thousands of mobile games are launched every year, and there are only a handful of hits,” he said.
AI tools may have a place in game development, Zelnick said, mentioning how AI tools could help writers come up with storyboards more quickly. But people are overstating what AI can do, he said.
“No one ever added value with a PowerPoint presentation. Nonetheless, lots of them are made all the time. If you could reduce the amount of time you spend on a PowerPoint presentation and still have a good PowerPoint presentation … Hallelujah, that’s phenomenal. But no one’s saying: ‘That’s great. We’re going to give you a big promotion because of the amazing PowerPoint you did for the internal committee,'” Zelnick said. “That’s not what we get paid for. What we get paid for is making the best entertainment on earth and that requires all kinds of things that technology cannot, and will never, do on its own.”
People might use AI tools to make video games, but making a game doesn’t mean it will be successful. The market is flooded with games that people do not know or care about, Zelnick said.
“There’s already plenty of technology out there that allow people to create video games, and as a result, thousands of video games are created every year, and yet the hits all cluster among the large entertainment companies, almost entirely, and now and then, an indie, which is generally speaking well-funded and pretty robust in and of itself,” he said.
Rockstar Games did not use generative AI to make GTA 6, but the technology sees widespread use at Take-Two, with the implementation of the technology “driving costs and time efficiencies.”
After multiple delays, GTA 6 launches on November 19, 2026 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
