In a statement yesterday, Take-Two revealed that they posted better-than-expected financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2015, with sales at $135.4 million, compared to $1.27 billion last year, but that was thanks to the launch of Grand Theft Auto V. That $135.4 million was obtained by the continued strength of GTA V, GTA Online, NBA 2K14, Borderlands, and WWE 2K14, with digital revenue contributing $89.8 million.
As part of their earnings call following the financial report, CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed that Grand Theft Auto V has officially sold 34 million copies, which is up from the 34 million shipped as of this summer:
In terms of GTA V, obviously, having sold something like 34 million units of GTA V for what is now a prior-gen, we know we’re attracting a very significant core gamer audience and we also attracted people who are not core gamers. But we don’t think we had 100% market share of everyone who had platforms, and so we do think there’s an opportunity for people who haven’t yet enjoyed the title to enjoy it for next-gen. Equally, when you do go buy a new platform, it seems to me that it would be very exciting to have one of the most important titles in the industry. But we tend to like to talk about this stuff after it’s happened not in advance.
We’re really proud of the lineup we’ve had. We’re immensely proud of the achievements of the Rockstar team for GTA, and we’re anxiously awaiting the November release. So we’ll see how it goes.
Elsewhere in the call, Zelnick was asked if there were any plans to release older games from their catalog on the new consoles, and he revealed they wouldn’t rule anything out:
In terms of the kind of titles we put out, and I understand your question, in any given year, we and our key competitors launch new intellectual properties and new iterations of older properties. And occasionally, when we see a platform shift, we will take an old property and create an iteration of that in a very similar form for next-gen, and we wouldn’t rule anything out. That would be driven by the market opportunity we perceive and the potential for delivering a quality release, and that would be very much something that’d also be driven by the passion of our labels. It would not be something that we would mandate to our labels.
Our labels are driven by the desire to delight consumers and pursue their creative passions, and that’s been a formula that’s worked extraordinarily well for this company for the past 7 years. So we’re not — we don’t have a policy answer to it, except our job around here is to make sure that consumers are thrilled, to deliver the very best titles in the marketplace, and to make sure that for the top creative talent in the industry, this is the #1 place to work.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Grand Theft Auto V are only a few weeks away from release on November 18.
[Source: Seeking Alpha, Take-Two via GameSpot, VG247]
