Publisher Take-Two is best known for GTA, Red Dead Redemption and its various sports games, but CEO Strauss Zelnick stressed on an earnings call last night that if the company wasn't willing to create new intellectual property, “well, then none of us would be sitting here today.”
For a company that has invested so much in GTA 5 and its annual NBA 2K, it can be easy to forget that Take-Two and its main publishing arm, 2K, have their fingers in a lot of things and aren't just reliant on sequels.
Zelnick got a little philosophical during the company's second-quarter earnings conference call yesterday, Nov. 7, 2024. “There's something called decay and entropy, and it's a characteristic of physics and human life and everything.” that exists on Earth,” he explains. “Ultimately, everything deteriorates, including successful titles. So if we're not trying new things and creating new intellectual property, to say we're resting on our laurels is really an understatement: we're really running the risk of burning down the furniture to warm the house.”
While GTA Online and NBA 2K are colossal sources of revenue, and Zelneck acknowledges that “most sequels in our franchise tend to do better than the previous release,” he adds that “we have teams delivering new hits all the time in mobile devices and on consoles. “You never know what the next GTA will be.
The list of games that Take-Two worked on is extensive. The titles you've definitely heard of, like BioShock, Civilization, and XCOM, are all huge, but they're also part of many smaller projects. One of my favorite forgotten gems is The Darkness. This was a strange experience where you played as a mafia member with snake-like, heart-eating tentacles who had to traverse modern-day city blocks as well as a World War I-inspired hellscape. It was out there.
More recently, it has also played a role in publishing or distributing the rougelite hit Hades, the charming Rollerdrome, and Marvel's overlooked Midnight Suns.
While the company has an impressive workforce, this strategy is not without its shortcomings. “This means that the risk profile is higher,” says Zelneck. “What it does mean is that when we mess up, and we will from time to time, we take a hit and that affects our operating margins.” At the beginning of this year, Take-Two laid off almost 600 people.
Zelneck also says that “the good news is, frankly, our hit rates are really high for this industry,” so hopefully he'll continue to invest in interesting titles like Spec Ops: The Line and The Quarry.
While Take-Two isn't just interested in sequels, we all want know everything about GTA 6so look what we've learned so far.