BioShock A Long Term Franchise, LA Noire, Beaterator Slip To Fiscal 2009

In its conference call with investors following its quarterly results announcement, officials from Take-Two have hinted at BioShock becoming a long-term franchise on a 'roughly 2 year interval,' as well as noted that Rockstar's LA Noire and Beaterator have slipped off the fiscal 2008 calendar. Answering an analyst question on properly whetting fan appetite without milking a franchise, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick said that, in part, while the sports business is properly on an annual calendar, the same shouldn't be said of other games. Zelnick said that a "roughly every two year schedule" was "optimal," which the company has traditionally roughly followed with its Grand Theft Auto games, saying that it's applying "the same strategy to BioShock" and adding that the company feels "awfully good about where that's going." Elsewhere in the call, while Zelnick couldn't say definitively how closely sales were matching the shipping numbers of BioShock, he could say sales thus far were "pretty terrific" and that it was well on its way to become "one of the fastest selling games in history." The executives also noted that the Rockstar and Team Bondi co-production LA Noire, an interactive detective story set in the classic noir period of the late 1940s first announced in September of last year has been pushed from the fiscal 2008 calendar - meaning it will not appear before November 2008. The same is true for Rockstar's music mixing and beatmaking PSP title Beaterator, which it is producing in conjunction with Timbaland. Executives couldn't yet elaborate on the projected release date for either game, but admitted that the decision was "driven in part by the fact that we've got such a robust schedule for [fiscal 08]."