Take-Two Quarterly Report: Revenue growth, Falling Profits and good sales of the GTA remaster trilogy

Main figures

• Take-Two’s net revenue was $903 million, which is 5% more compared to the third quarter of last year.
• 88% of the company’s revenue came from digital sales — $795.7 million. Growth by 7% in annual terms.
• $551 million or 61% of revenue came from in-game purchases, including DLC and microtransactions. Take-Two did not say exactly how the indicator has changed compared to last year, noting only that it remains “relatively constant”.
• If we talk about platforms, then the most cash were consoles. They provided Take-Two with 74.7% of revenue — $665.5 million. PC was responsible for another 14.8% ($133.9 million), and mobile — for 10.5% ($103.8 million).
• Most of the revenue (59.2%) came from the USA.
• Net receipts (net booking) increased by 6% to $866.1 million.
• But the publisher’s net profit fell by 20.7%, amounting to $144.5 million. For comparison, in the third quarter of fiscal 2021, it was $182.2 million.

Data on specific games

• The main drivers of the company’s growth in the third quarter were sales of games such as NBA 2K22, NBA 2K21, GTA Online, GTA V, GTA: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition, Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online, Borderlands 3 and Two Dots.
• The circulation of the entire Grand Theft Auto series has reached 370 million copies sold. GTA V accounted for over 160 million copies.
• The publisher did not disclose the exact sales of the classic GTA remaster trilogy, but indicated that they “exceeded expectations.” The VGC publication estimated that it could be about 10 million copies sold.
• The release of the remaster trilogy on iOS and Android should take place in the first half of 2022. In addition, the next generation version of GTA V will be released on March 15. When the next part of GTA will be ready, the company did not specify.
• Sales of Red Dead Redemption 2 have approached 43 million copies since its release. The circulation of the entire series is 65 million copies sold.
• NBA 2K has sold 121 million copies since its release.
• To date, 15 million copies of Borderlands 3 have been sold — it is the fastest selling 2K game. The total circulation of the series is over 74 million copies.
• Sales of Sid Meier’s Civilization reached 61 million copies, and the BioShock series — 39 million copies.
• Downloads of the mobile Two Dots exceeded 100 million.

Future plans

For the entire fiscal year 2022, which ends on March 31, 2022, Take-Two expects to earn $3.41-3.46 billion. Net profit should be in the range of $361-373 million.

In an interview with the GamesIndustry portal.biz the head of the company Strauss Zelnik (Strauss Zelnick) noted that Take-Two is not going to massively buy up game studios at least in the near future. He recalled the deal announced in January with Zynga for $12.7 billion and called the company being acquired “a very rare asset.” However, Zynga itself may continue to be active in the M&A market.

Zelnik also admitted that in the future NFT may appear in the company’s games. The head of Take-Two is sure that tokens have potential, but he did not deny that the NFT sphere can attract speculators.