Grand Theft Auto V sold 150 million copies, but Take-Two lamented a drop in sales in the first quarter.
According to Take-Two, the company’s revenue declined 2 percent to $ 813 million for the first three months ended June 30, 2021, while net bookings decreased 29 percent to $ 711 million. Those numbers exceeded the company’s revenue forecast of $ 780 million, with the upper end of the range for net bookings being $ 675 million.
Net income for the first quarter rose 72 percent year over year to $ 152 million.
The publisher blamed Grand Theft Auto V, Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online and Borderlands 3 for the first quarter results. Take-Two also noted that it was difficult to compare to the same quarter last year, when the games industry reported a significant increase in its results.
“We are pleased to see that post-pandemic demand was higher than pre-pandemic demand, as we expected, and the slowdown we expected was not as severe as we expected,” says Strauss Zelnick , Chairman and CEO of Take-Two, told GamesIndustry.biz, adding: “As we are hopefully getting out of this difficult time – it’s hard to know, given what is happening to the Delta variant – it’s nice to see that the new normal for our business is much stronger than the old normal. “
Grand Theft Auto V has surpassed 150 million units sold, and Grand Theft Auto Online’s reach is up 72 percent from two years ago.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has now sold more than 38 million copies, while Red Dead Online has increased its player base by 18 percent compared to the first quarter two years ago.
NBA 2K21 and Civilization VI each sold more than 11 million versions,
The publisher said the 2K label will announce a new franchise in August, but didn’t explicitly name a delayed title. Zelnick reiterated that the pandemic has no impact on Take-Two’s development pipeline, describing the delays as a result of “our never-ending search for quality and fine-tuning” rather than an impact of developing from home.
With a view to the future, Take-Two is again setting the bar lower than last year. For the second fiscal quarter, the company expects a decline in sales of up to 12 percent. Net income is likely to be roughly halved, between $ 41 million and $ 53 million.
“We’re bringing out 20 titles this year, and we expect to have roughly the same number of titles over the next two years,” he says. “And we expect that we will set records again from fiscal year ’23.”
