Over 60 releases planned for the period 2022-2024
Publisher Take-Two Interactive has released its financial report for the fiscal period ending March 2021, revealing that the Grand Theft Auto publisher raked in a staggering, record-breaking revenue of $3.73 billion USD over the course of the past year.
Recurrent spending is the main driver of Take-Two’s profits, with 68% of revenue coming from the communities of ongoing releases such as Grand Theft Auto Online and NBA 2K21, as well as microtransaction heavy mobile titles such as Borderlands 3, Two Dots, and WWE SuperCard. GTA Online was particularly successful, with a record number of players jumping into the MMO over 2020, and in-game spending up 30% on the previous year.
“We believe that the pandemic initiated a transformational shift in entertainment consumption, revealing the possibilities of interactive entertainment to a much broader market, with interactive entertainment becoming the number one entertainment vertical,” said Take-Two in its report. “We anticipate that the overall addressable market for our industry will be notably larger going forward than it was pre-pandemic. However, as the world returns to a new normal, we expect a moderation of the trends that benefitted our industry over the past year.”
An unsurprisingly robotic reflection of the past year’s horribleness.
Take-Two has also offered a summation of its plans for the coming years, which will see the publisher lead much harder into new releases. Between the years 2022 and 2024, Take-Two expects to have launched around 62 games, 19 of which it describes as “immersive core” releases. Interestingly, seven of those titles are said to be sports-related, which will put Take-Two in direct competition with Electronic Arts, who itself is seemingly engaged in a strong push to sew up as much of the lucrative sports market as possible.
Take-Two’s next major release will be the next-gen re-release of Grand Theft Auto V on PS5 and Xbox Series X. Now seven years old, Rockstar’s magnum opus remains one of the greatest-selling games of all time, having sold over 140 million copies since its initial launch in 2013. The number is only set to grow and grow once Franklin and friends return come November 11.
