Take Two Leader Says Company Games Should Be Great, Not Good

When someone says that a product is “good,” the manufacturer should take it as a compliment, but the video game world has devalued the word so much that publisher Take Two now expects its video games to be no less than “great.”

Strauss Zelnick, who is the chief executive officer of Take Two and its chairman, has said at the Wedbush Morgan Securities Technology, Media & Telecommunications: Management Access Conference, “Making good games just isn't good enough. I believe good is the new bad. ... Games need to be great.”

He added, “Unlike many other entertainment business - there are just a few - ratings by Metacritic and others' reviews really can influence the success of a newly-released title. In fact, if your ratings go below a certain level, it can really hurt your ability to sell the title, and above a certain level can make a real difference in your success.”

Metacritic is certainly important to the video game industry because it allows a possible customer to quickly get a picture of how well a title has been received by critics, with a quick aggregate number indicating a sort of value consensus.

But critics points out that the way Metacritic translates star- and letter-based ranking systems into numbers is not the most accurate and that actually reading a review from a critic always gives a better picture of what a game has to offer than simply looking at a number.

Zelnick is taking about Metacritic just as the aggregation service said that Take Two is the publisher which had the best overall review scores for the year 2010.

The CEO and chairman says that the publisher will continue putting most of its resources into the development of AAA titles, which require big investments but can deliver big revenue, but that they are also exploring the free-to-play and Facebook-based business spaces.