Take2 in financial difficulty due to GTA4 delay

[Sullla]

FishyJoe said:

As a result, an incredible 32 percent of company stock is outstanding, meaning investors are anything but confident with Rockstar's sugar daddy at the moment.

32 percent?! Dear Lord, that's unbelievably bad. No one wants to own stock in this company, it seems. Can't blame anyone, since I certainly wouldn't waste my money on Take-Two!

Having worked (briefly) for Firaxis Games, which is a developer owned by Take-Two, I want to re-emphasize TheBigFatJ's comments. When we were working on Civilization 4 (published by Take-Two), we were given a firm release date by which the game absolutely HAD to be done in order to be on shelves in time for Christmas 2005. As it turned out, the game actually wasn't ready, but the publisher forced it out anyway, causing some serious compatibility problems with various graphics cards. To Firaxis' credit, they fixed things pretty fast with some patches, but the fact remains that Take-Two was very insistent on having our game release on schedule.

So in other words, from my own experience, I also surmise that something very wrong happened with the development of Grand Theft Auto 4. The game really can't be delayed again, so I suspect that the developers are working under extreme pressure right now. It makes you wonder how a company that receives so much praise from critics can turn out to be so poorly run. (I suspect that Take-Two's strategy of "make nothing but high-budget extravaganzas" is what's killing them, at the same time that it makes them gaming media darlings!)