Take-Two Interactive president Karl Slatoff said during the company’s earnings call Wednesday that the publishing label will produce 93 new titles by March 2025 and half of them will be original properties.
15 of these new games will be “extensions of existing titles,” Slatoff said.
Take-Two owns game publisher 2K, the label behind popular sports simulation franchises “NBA 2K “and “NHL 2K,” and the 2006 “Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” release. Take-Two also owns Rockstar Games, the studio that developed the “Red Dead Redemption” games and the “Grand Theft Auto” franchise.
During its annual earnings report May 20 Take-Two said the two Rockstar franchises were its top performers –“Grand Theft Auto V” has shipped 130 million copies since its 2013 release, and “Red Dead Redemption 2” has sold 31 million units since 2018. Both the “Grand Theft Auto” and “Red Dead” franchises have social online versions of the games — and Take-Two Interactive said “GTA Online” and “Red Dead Online” were two of its top revenue earners throughout last year.
Slatoff said in Take-Two Interactive’s earnings call that 63 of the total 93 titles will be “core gaming experiences” for experienced players, while “17 are mid-core or arcade-style experiences and 13 titles are casual experiences. 47 of these 93 titles are from existing franchises and 46 are from new intellectual properties.”
Take-Two Interactive chief executive Strauss Zelnick didn’t confirm during the call if any of these new titles will include the much-anticipated “Grand Theft Auto VI” release, but did clarify the release slate will include content from Rockstar Games. “Grand Theft Auto VI” is still in early stages of development.
This year Take-Two Interactive will release a remastered “Mafia” trilogy and “PGA Tour 2K1” for consoles — and several titles for the Nintendo Switch including ports of the “Borderlands Legendary Collection”, “Outer Worlds” and “Bioshock: The Collection.” A new “WWE 2K Battlegrounds” game will come out this fall but Take-Two has not yet said which platforms it will be playable on.
Take-Two also promised in March a new game made in partnership with the National Football League that will not be a simulated sports game — a departure from its simulated “NFL 2K” franchise. The currently untitled NFL game will come out sometime in 2021.
Take-Two beat its 2019 revenue and earnings expectations, with net income up from $57 million in 2018 to $122 million, a nearly 116% increase. Digitally delivered revenue grew 41% to roughly $2.4 billion in 2019, driven mostly by in-game purchases on “GTA Online” and “Red Dead Online”.