Take-Two CEO Calls BioShock 4 a Waste of Time and Money

"Deeply disappointed." Those are the words Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick chose when asked about BioShock 4's development, and they barely scratch the surface of what he actually said. In a wide-ranging interview with Game File's Stephen Totilo, Zelnick delivered one of the most brutally honest assessments I've seen a CEO give about a game his own company is still actively making: "I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends."

Cloud Chamber was established in 2019 with the sole purpose of making the next BioShock, and nearly seven years later, there's no release date, no gameplay, and nothing resembling a finished product. The studio was hit with significant layoffs in 2025, former studio head Kelley Gilmore was fired, and former Diablo boss Rod Fergusson was brought in to try and salvage the project. When Totilo asked Zelnick if the prolonged development had surprised him, the CEO pushed back on the word itself. "Think about what 'surprise' implies. That's like, one day, everything's awesome, and the next day, I'm like, 'Holy shit.' And I don't run the business that way."

What strikes me about this interview isn't just the candor; it's how damning the specifics are. Zelnick isn't describing a game that's taking a long time because it's ambitious. He's describing a project that burned through years and headcount chasing ideas that didn't work, and only started recovering after leadership was gutted and more than 80 positions were eliminated. "I'm feeling a lot better," Zelnick says now, which is a grim thing to say about a game that still has no release window. BioShock Infinite came out in 2013. If BioShock 4 ships in 2027 or later, that's a 14-year gap between entries, with most of that time apparently spent on creative dead ends. Netflix and Take-Two are reportedly "very anxious" for a BioShock film to coincide with the game's release, which only adds pressure to a project that clearly can't handle more of it.