Take Two increased its annual profit due to the lack of major releases
Take Two publishing house has successfully completed the next year. Last year, the company did not release large game projects, but only developed existing ones. As a result, Take Two’s revenues remained at the same level, but the profit increased by 1.5 times.
This is stated in the company’s financial report for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended on March 31 of this year.
Last year, Take Two earned $1.8 billion and received $173.5 million in net profit — 158% more than a year earlier.
One of the important factors in increasing profits last year was the reduction of software development costs and royalty payments — the company spent $191.4 million for these needs, not $335.5 million, as in 2016.
In addition, in fiscal year 2018, Take Two did not spend a lot of money on the creation and release of large-scale game projects, with the exception of the numbered parts of the NBA 2K18 and WWE 2k18 sports. For comparison, in 2016, the publisher released three big titles at once: Mafia III, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI and XCOM 2.
The current Take Two strategy will last at least until next year: the publisher has once again postponed the release of the second part of the cowboy action movie Red Dead Redemption (now no earlier than April 2019) and announced that it will not present new games at the next E3 exhibition.
What does Take Two earn
In the last fiscal year, the publishing house’s main source of revenue was digital sales of games and content. “Digit” generated more than half of all revenues — $1.1 billion, and a significant share of this amount came from in-game purchases.
The company named such titles as Grand Theft Auto V, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, as well as the NBA and WWE sports series as the main sources of digital revenue for fiscal year 2018.
According to the CEO of Take Two, Strauss Zelnik, the GTA V multiplayer mode last year generated a record amount for 5 years of the game’s existence, and the total shipments of the title exceeded 95 million copies.
Also on the topic:
- Take-Two: The gaming industry will completely switch to digital sales in 5-20 years
- Global sales of GTA V exceeded 90 million copies
Source: Take Two
