Last week, Nikita Bier wanted an AI to build him his own “Grand Theft Auto.” Now he’s writing the franchise’s eulogy.
Late Monday, Bier posted on X that “There’s something beautiful about the most expensive game of all time ($2B) being dropped the same month that AI models became capable of creating comparable experiences.”
He closed with “The swan song for the Big Studio Era.” Elon Musk replied with one word: “Yeah.”
The target is the business model at Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. (NASDAQ:TTWO), which launches “Grand Theft Auto VI” on Nov. 19. Shares closed down 4.07% at $200.32 Tuesday afternoon, per Benzinga Pro market data.
The $2 Billion Bet
Bier used the high end of the estimates. Axios has reported that the game cost $2 billion to develop. Fortune, citing industry analysts, put it between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. Take-Two declined to confirm a number, and CEO Strauss Zelnick would only say the game “was expensive.”
Take-Two spent roughly a decade building one game while AI tools shrink the time it takes to make one. Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google Labs launched Playground last week, a no-code platform for making games with AI.
Zelnick Isn’t Buying It
Zelnick has been one of the industry’s loudest AI skeptics.
“There is no creativity that can exist by definition in any AI model, because it is data-driven,” he said at a CNBC event last October. He added that AI output would be “pretty derivative.”
AI-built games still have limits and most are remakes of existing titles because models rely on past footage, and hobbyists don’t have the resources to build anything as big as GTA VI. Developer Matt Shumer still expects small teams directing AI agents to eventually build games on that scale, Axios reported.
Pre-Orders vs. Prompts
So far, demand looks fine. “The level of pre-orders is unprecedented and astonishing, but they are so unprecedented that we just don’t know how it’ll translate into sales,” Zelnick said in August, per Reuters.
Newzoo estimated global pre-orders at $260 million, which points to as much as $4.5 billion in sales by launch week, according to CNBC. Take-Two still kept its fiscal 2027 bookings forecast at $8 billion to $8.2 billion, below the $8.86 billion analysts expected.
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The Chart
Take-Two stock closed 2025 at $256.03. At $201.85, the stock is down about 21% this year and almost 22% below its July 6 closing high of $258.41. Most of the drop came in the past three months, with shares down about 17% from $244.10 in mid-July.
The chart below shows the one-year performance of TTWO stock:
TakeTwo’s slide has picked up into GTA’s November launch. The stock has lost about 7% in the past month and trades below both its 50-day moving average of $220.97 and its 200-day average of $223.14, per Benzinga Pro data.
Tuesday’s volume shows the selling is real. More than 5.2 million shares changed hands in the session, more than double the average of about 2.4 million. The next support level is the March 27 closing low of $189.69, about 6% below the current price. The 52-week intraday low is $187.63.
TTWO Stock Price Activity: Take-Two Interactive shares closed down 4.07% at $200.32 on Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro.
Photo: Miguel Lagoa / Shutterstock
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