In an interview, Strauss Zelnick portrays the disastrous release of GTA Trilogy as a fixed “glitch”. The reality is different.
Unfamiliar position: The CEO of GTA publisher Take-Two expressed a surprisingly positive perception of the remaster collection in an interview with the US news portal (CNBC). Strauss Zelnick referred to the disastrous launch of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition as a glitch that has been fixed.
Financial journalist Jim Cramer had pointed out to Zelnick that the game had been released with errors – and that this was not in line with Take-Two’s self-imposed goal of only releasing games to the market in a finished state. Zelnick then rebuffed this and emphasised that the trilogy was not a new game, but a remaster. A bug had been fixed. Moreover, they were happy about the success, which had simply been great for the company.
“And as far as the GTA trilogy, that wasn’t actually a new title. That was a remaster of existing titles. We had a glitch [German: Panne, Funktionsstörung] at the beginning that was fixed. And the title just turned out great for the company. So we’re very excited about it.”
(Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick)
n the international press the remasters don’t come off any better: the rating average on (Metacritic) is even only 49 out of 100 points. Metacritic users even rate GTA Trilogy with a subterranean 0.6 out of 10 points.
Although the developers did indeed roll out major patches with improvements for GTA Trilogy afterwards, as rightly noted by Zelnick in principle, some problems remain to this day. So the generally optimistic portrayal of the Take-Two boss does not match the reality of many fans.
But at least they make it clear to investors and shareholders that the remasters are still considered a success from Take-Two’s economic point of view. But that is likely to make disappointed gamers even angrier.
Much anger among gamers
In the fans’ reactions to the statement, for example on (Reddit), there is a lot of indignation. Here, players continue to complain about bugs and performance problems and feel that the statements have been taken to the cleaners. In addition, several commentators have now lost hope that patches for the titles will follow in order to fix the remaining bugs.
