While Take Two Interactive has its thumbs in a lot of pies, we’re reporting on the company’s third quarter financial news primarily because it owns Rockstar Games, the developer behind GTA Online and Red Dead Online, which is all within our wheelhouse. Also, the company’s CEO had some interesting thoughts about some industry trends.
First, the fiscals: Q3 saw lower than expected net bookings of $1.38 billion, which Take Two blamed on “macroeconomic conditions” that caused people to spend less over the holiday season. With that said, GTA V continued to exceed the company’s expectations, with 175 million units sold to date driven by GTA Online’s seasonal events and the Drug Wars update. Red Dead Online’s updates also saw sales of Red Dead Redemption 2 outpace Take Two’s expectations.
The remarks during the investor’s call also call out Take Two’s NBA2K franchise continuing to grow, laud the recent launch of Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and state that mobile games developer Zynga met expectations in terms of in-app purchases.
That investor’s call also saw some interesting opinions for CEO Strauss Zelnick, who downplayed the ability of AI to create a competitor to the next GTA game while also talking up the need for human devs to be more creative to counter AI adoption. Zelnick also argues that cloud gaming should be considered an evolution of games distribution and not a business model, and he remarks that subscription services like Game Pass are not big enough to cannibalize the business.
