Take-Two CEO Claims Roll7 Studio and Intercept Games Weren’t Shut Down, “We Didn’t Shutter Those Studios”

Following reports that Roll7 Studio and Intercept Games had been shut down by parent company Take-Two Interactive, the company’s chief executive officer Strauss Zelnick responded to questions on those closures by claiming “We didn’t shutter those studios, to be clear.”

When the news broke regarding Roll7 and Intercept, the original report came from Bloomberg, where reporter Jason Schreier made it clear that Take-Two is indeed closing down these studios.

Employees at both studios even seemed to publicly corroborate the report, saying they were looking for work following the shutdowns. But in an interview with IGN, Zelnick appears to be playing semantics with the wording around the studios being shuttered.

“We didn’t shutter those studios, to be clear. And we are always looking at our release schedule across all of our studios to make sure that it makes sense. So we are being very judicious because we are in the middle of a cost reduction program that we’ve already concluded and are now fully rolling out.

We’ve announced that we’re saving $165 million in existing and future costs, but we haven’t shuttered anything,” Zelnick told IGN.

When asked if Zelnick was denying reports of the studios closing, IGN reports that a PR representative stepped in to add: “What we’ve said is, in the 8-K filing that we put out we talked about the cost reduction plan is approximately 5% reduction in headcount worldwide, but we did not give a label-by-label breakdown of what that looks like.”

Shortly after IGN published Zelnick’s claims that these studios weren’t shuttered, Schreier took to Twitter to publish a note that was shared to him for his original report, which he’s sharing now at the permission of his source.

The note reads “Over the last year, amid a climate of operating more efficiently, we cut our budget on signing new game prototypes. Unfortunately, we also had several game titles we shipped that did not achieve their breakout potential.

All of this was against the backdrop of a market in which high-quality independent games have struggled to stand out, which has put even more pressure on the business to find efficiencies and be profitable. We are therefore proposing to shut down the Roll 7 Studio.”

Source – [IGN, Jason Schreier on Twitter]