Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick is a force to be reckoned with. A man who has helped push some of the most innovative and creatively awesome titles to the finish line over the last several years.  But over those years there has been a lot of time...effort...and killing hookers, so when Zelnick says that the current model of yearly releases isn't sustainable, he knows what he's talking about.

Big budget Triple-A titles need time and effort put upon them, not just a new coat of paint, a first-draft script and some geographically confused accents. Zelnick was a speaker at the UBS Media and Communications conference and while he didn't specifically name any franchises he had however just finished discussing Activision's stance in the market place.

Zelnick said that if "you start trying to stamp these products out annually, we don't think that's consistent with a high-quality result".  Essentially the current Call of Duty model, even with a subscription service, is not sustainable. Zelnick added that if you give consumers something every year like clockwork, they will eventually grow tired of it.

Whil3 I would agree with Zelnick, MW3 did pull in over half a billion dollars in sales last month and I tend not to argue with creative figures that I will never ever ever ever ever ever see in my lifetime. Figures have been coming out about how GameStop and a few other retailers have sold over half a million Premium Subscriptions to Call of Duty's subscription service Elite and have continued to grow as such.

Zelnick queried the viability of such a subscription service saying he couldn't tell whether it was relevant yet. "I'm kind of skeptical, frankly. I suspect that we want a different experience on our big screen than we do on our middle-sized screen than we do on our mobile screen, because I think we use them at different times and they mean different things. I do think an intellectual property can thread through, but only if it is really high quality."

That being said users who signed up for Elite crashed the servers twice in the first week of release due to it's popularity and the unbelievable amount of support that Activision had not prepared for. Jamie Berger of Activision has actually said that "right now, it's an option", when talking about Elite, but he also adds that it might not be in "3-5 years."

So both Activision and Zelnick are not thinking about keeping a community running in the long term; they should team up on something.

Via [GameSpot]

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