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Re: After an extended leave
Dan Houser is leaving TTWO
I credit the Housers more for the overall quality, that
commitment to excellence coming from the top and filtering
throughout the whole org, rather than just the writing. Remember
all those stories about them being like the Eye of Sauron, where
they're focused on some other game for a while, then they come in
and see the last year or two work on the next game from some other
studio, and they just toss everything, then eventually polish,
polish, polish, at enormous expense like no other developer except
Blizzard does. If you lose that, that special sauce, they're just
like every other developer really. The loss of top leadership at
Rockstar also opens the door for Zelnick's cronies to try and
weasel their way in and "improve" it, you know like EA has done to
countless developers before, and Zelnick has made it clear he wants
to see faster schedules and more monetization.
The Rockstar output is so sparse these days and GTA and RDR are
so big I'm sure they'll be fine for years to come. If they have
other games in the pipeline though, you might have to scale back
expectations of them being monster hits so the stock taking some
hit is fair I think, but at the end of the day that's probably just
temporary volatility since it shouldn't affect earnings for the
next year at least. I'd be much more concerned about where
Rockstar's standing is in 5 years.
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