A major player on the gaming market
Take-Two Interactive was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in New York City with development studios all across the globe. In the company’s fiscal year 2022 (ending March 2022), Take-Two saw more than 3.5 billion U.S. dollars in revenues and an annual net income of 418 million U.S. dollars. Almost more than 72 percent of Take-Two’s annual revenues are generated via gaming consoles with recurrent consumer spending (including virtual currency, add-on content, and in-game purchases) making up the bulk of sales.At the end of fiscal 2022, Take-Two Interactive had approximately 7,799 full-time employees with about half of those working outside the United States.
Popular gaming titles by Take-Two Interactive
Major franchises in the Take-Two Interactive portfolio include 2K Sports, BioShock, Borderlands, Mafia, Sid Meier's Civilization, and XCOM (via 2K Games), Grand Theft Auto, L.A. Noire, Max Payne and Red Dead (via Rockstar Games), as well as publishing rights of indie hits such as The Outer Worlds or Hades through its Private Division label for mid-sized independent developers.Games owned by Take-Two often boast impressive sales. Grand Theft Auto and the NBA 2K series can claim more than 120 million unit sales each, and Rockstar’s highly anticipated release of Read Dead Redemption 2 in October 2018 saw the game selling a staggering 17 million copies in the two weeks post launch.
Top game: Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5)
Grand Theft Auto is one of the best-selling franchises in gaming with Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5) being the most enduringly popular title of the entire series. First released in 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the action-adventure has gotten a re-release for PC and every new PlayStation and Xbox generation since then. As of May 2022, GTA 5 has generated more than 165 million lifetime unit sales with no signs of slowing down. Recent company outlook data does not indicate any updates regarding a release slot for the game's successor, GTA 6, which means that Take-Two is in no rush to abandon its top title for a while yet.GTA 5 is also one of the top ranked games on streaming platform Twitch, where the title regularly accounts for a significant chunk of total Twitch audiences. In March 2022, Twitch viewers watched approximately 29.7 million weekly hours of Grand Theft Auto 5 gaming content.
Take-Two’s acquisition of Zynga in context
In 2021, mobile and social accounted for the majority of gaming revenues worldwide. Take-Two’s entries in the mobile gaming market have so far been met with comparatively modest success and the company is aggressively moving to change that.To further expand its mobile gaming division, Take-Two purchased mobile developer Nordeus (now rebranded as T2 Mobile Games) in June 2021 and the company took its acqui-hiring strategy one step further by buying mobile social gaming giant Zynga for 12.7 billion U.S. dollars in January 2022, its biggest acquisition to date. This move mirrors industry competitor Activision Blizzard’s successful purchase of King (publisher of Candy Crush Saga) in 2016.
