Featured Image Credit: 2K Games
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has addressed the status of BioShock 4, delivering an update not many of us wanted to hear.
BioShock 4 has been teased several times over the years since its original formal announcement in 2019, though there still hasn’t been anything in the way of official screenshots or a trailer yet.
With it now being 12 years since the release of BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea, the last major release in the series, fans have lost hope of ever seeing the series revived again.
Speaking to Game File (via Screen Rant), Zelnick has addressed the lack of a new BioShock, which has been delayed internally many times over the years since 2019.
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“Think about what ‘surprise’ implies,” Zelnick says, referring to his reaction to the surprise delays the game has received. “That’s like, one day, everything’s awesome, and the next day, I’m like, ‘Holy sh*t.’ And I don’t run the business that way. But I think if you’re saying ‘disappointed,’ yes. Deeply disappointed.”
Zelnick adds, “I think finding the right creative purchase was hard, as it turns out. I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends.”
He blames this approach on the “nature of entertainment”, saying “with big team activities, you can't necessarily tell how it's going to be until it all comes together, or begins to come together, and that can take a while and can be very costly.”
The BioShock series was put on hold after the conclusion of Burial At Sea, with Irrational Games being closed and rebranded to Ghost Story Games in 2017.
It was known then that while Ghost Story Games would be focusing on a new IP, BioShock would continue at 2K Games under a new developer.
This began with the Austin-based developer Certain Affinity, before being moved in-house to an internal 2K developer. This turned out to be a new studio called Cloud Chamber, which has been working on BioShock 4 since 2019.
Cloud Chamber staff includes Kelley Gilmore, who had previously worked at Firaxis, and BioShock alumni Scott Sinclair, Jonathan Pelling, and Hogarth de la Plante.
An August 2025 report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier claimed that an internal review of BioShock 4 wasn’t well received by 2K, which led to changes at Cloud Chamber, including Gears of War and Diablo veteran Rod Fergusson being brought in to lead the developer.
Fergusson was previously brought in to oversee BioShock Infinite’s development towards the end, helping the game’s troubled production get back on track. This can be seen by comparing BioShock Infinite’s first trailer with the product we ended up with.
Information on this version of BioShock 4 is still light, though reports have claimed that it will be more of an immersive sim and be set in a "semi-open world".
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