Every time a new technology emerges, someone inevitably claims it will democratise creativity. Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, has heard this song before, and he is not buying it when it comes to artificial intelligence and video game development.
In a recent interview, Zelnick pushed back hard against the notion that game developers can now simply "push a button" and generate a hit. "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.
His comments arrive amid genuine market jitters. When Google announced Project Genie, a generative AI tool capable of creating game-like virtual worlds, shares in Take-Two and other gaming companies took a nosedive. The market feared, apparently, that the barriers to entry in game development had just collapsed. Investors panicked. Zelnick looked around with genuine puzzlement.
Here is the thing about the gaming business: it has never been easy to create a hit, regardless of the tools available. Zelnick notes that music software now allows people 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." The technology works. The output is technically proficient. But nobody is humming along a second time.
The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is flooded with mediocre games. "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," Zelnick explains. The barrier to making a game has been low for years. The barrier to making a game that people actually want to play remains stubbornly high.
Where might AI legitimately help? According to Zelnick, tools could help writers "come up with storyboards more quickly," or streamline PowerPoint presentations for internal meetings. Fine. But that is not what the hype machine is selling. The hype machine is selling the fantasy that genius is now optional.
"There is no creativity that can exist by definition in any AI model, because it is data-driven," Zelnick has said, emphasising a point he has made repeatedly since 2023. AI cannot 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." People will try, he predicts. But they will fail.
Take-Two itself is not an AI sceptic by any means. The company says it "was built on the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence," that "all video games are created almost entirely in computers," and that it "have hundreds of AI pilots and implementations going on right now across" the company. But grand strategy requires discernment. When it comes to Grand Theft Auto 6, the game coming November 19, 2026, generative AI has had "zero part" in what Rockstar Games has been building.
The counterargument exists, of course. One need only point to corporate history to see that labour-saving technology does displace workers. When Zelnick argues that AI "will not reduce employment," some observers fairly note that automation routinely does exactly that. His faith in technology as a pure multiplier of human effort, rather than a substitute for it, reflects optimism that history has not always validated.
Yet on the narrower question of whether AI can independently generate hits, the market itself seems to agree with him. Take-Two delivered $1.76 billion in net bookings in recent results, well above guidance, with all divisions over-performing; GTA Online revenue jumped 27 per cent, while NBA 2K saw a 30 per cent increase. These games were made by talented people using sophisticated tools. No shortcuts. No buttons.
This is where Zelnick's scepticism gains real traction: the games industry has spent two decades proving that you cannot automate away the requirement for genius. You can lower the barrier to entry. You can create powerful tools. But you cannot replace vision, craft, and the ability to make millions of people want to spend their time in a world you have created. Until AI can do that, all the hype remains sound and fury. Just like that AI-generated song.