Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick Says He Has Not Played GTA 6

GTA 6 is probably the most anticipated game ever made. Years of near-total silence from Rockstar have done absolutely nothing to cool that anticipation. People are going to play this game. Millions of them.

Apparently, one person who won't be among them is Strauss Zelnick.

If you don't follow the business side of gaming, Zelnick is the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, a role he's held since 2011. His career before that included serving as chairman of CBS and founding private equity firm ZMC. On the gaming side, he oversaw the releases of GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, Max Payne 3, and a whole lot more. The man has been around enormous gaming successes. He just hasn't, you know, played them.

In a May 2025 interview with CNBC, Zelnick addressed the by-then highly publicised GTA 6 delay into late 2026, expressing confidence in the project despite the setback. He said Rockstar "is trying to create the best thing anyone's ever seen in entertainment, not just interactive entertainment." Coming from almost anyone else that would read as pure PR spin. With Rockstar, it lands differently.

But then came the admission. Zelnick told CNBC he hasn't actually played any of GTA 6, despite presumably having access to a build of the game as the head of its parent company. His reasoning was direct: he's "not a gamer" and not the "consumer-in-chief" of Take-Two Interactive. He drew a parallel to his earlier career:

"I think being the consumer-in-chief in the entertainment business as the CEO is probably a mistake. I wasn't the consumer-in-chief in the movie business or the television business or the music business, even though I certainly could read a script and I definitely love music... but that's not my role."

A lot of gamers will read that and roll their eyes. Fair enough, really. Corporate decision-making has caused a lot of damage to this industry: studio closures that made no sense, monetisation that borders on predatory, development cultures that burned people out. The instinct to be sceptical of a CEO who doesn't even play games is understandable.

But there's another way to look at it.

At the scale of something like Grand Theft Auto, the people who actually make the game and the people who manage the money around it are, by necessity, different groups. Rockstar has the writers, directors, animators, and designers. Take-Two has the business infrastructure. You need both for a project this size to exist.

The question isn't really whether Zelnick plays games. It's whether he knows his lane.

And on that front, he seems to. In the same interview, he said his job is "to attract, retain, and motivate the best talent in the business, and then get out of their way." That last part matters. Rockstar has built one of the strongest track records in the history of the medium. A CEO who understands that his role is to support rather than interfere is, arguably, exactly what a studio like that needs.

The risk with a gaming CEO who is also a passionate gamer is that they start thinking their taste should influence the product. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn't. Zelnick seems aware that he has nothing creatively useful to offer Rockstar, and his job is to make sure the conditions exist for them to do their best work.

Whether GTA 6 ends up living up to its extraordinary expectations remains to be seen. But Zelnick staying out of Rockstar's way seems like one of the better things he can do for it.