Take-Two, the parent company behind Rockstar, 2K, and Private Division, appears to be cooking up something big.
For the last year and change, they've been telling shareholders to expect a significant, hefty release slate down the pipeline, promising last fiscal year a total of 93 games in the coming five years, and more recently outlining its plans for a slate of "immersive core releases" over the next three years.
During today's earnings call, Take-Two continued to lay out expectations in a similar manner. Between April of 2022 and March of 2024, it's preparing over 60 new releases: 23 "immersive core" titles, similar to its 2K sports games, GTA, and Red Dead Redemption; six games from its independent game publishing label, Private Division; 20 mobile games, four "mid-core" games that are either arcade titles like WWE Battlegrounds or just generally smaller in scope than, say, GTA; and nine games that are either ports or remasters.
That's a significant uptick from what Take-Two has produced in the past, specifically in the immersive core department. In recent years, Take-Two has largely produced a few big games per year, mostly annual 2K releases and then, sporadically, a GTA or Red Dead. On average, to get to 23 in that time frame, it would need to produce seven to eight big blockbuster games each year of that period. That's a lot of GTAs.
We can see the very beginnings of this in Take-Two's current upcoming slate, which had NBA 2K22 out in September, WWE 2K22 set for March, and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands also in March. Looking into next year, we know about Midnight Suns (which just got delayed into the second half of 2022) and Kerbal Space Program 2 planned for fiscal 2023 (which Take-Two is counting as immersive core despite being under the Private Division label). It's also a fairly safe bet to expect the company to keep bringing out NBA 2K and WWE 2K games on a fairly regular basis, and there's an NFL game in the works that's been delayed past March of 2022 (though that may fall under the "arcade" banner).
A look at Take-Two's investor slide presentation shows how they're preparing for this cascade. On a slide showing new hire numbers by fiscal year, Take-Two shows that from 2012 to 2017, it was only hiring a few hundred people per year. But in 2017, it jumped to hiring around 700 folks, and in 2019 and 2020 it hired a similar amount. Today's earnings report included the detail that Take-Two brought in 350 new developers in this quarter alone, not including more senior hires, and in a conversation with IGN, CEO Strauss Zelnick said Take-Two was now somewhere around 7,200 employees strong worldwide. As of it's 2020 annual report, the company was at about 5,800 — that's a 1,400 person jump since March of last year, and during a global pandemic too.
Take-Two certainly has the resources for this surge. It's experienced consistent growth in its net bookings year after year, and expects to do so again in the current fiscal year. Just this last quarter, it brought in $985 million in net bookings. That's only up 3% year-over-year. But when you consider that it's been able to sustain net bookings growth since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, that's fairly significant.
Meanwhile, GTA V continues to sell absurd quantities — another five million in the last quarter, bringing it to 155 million units sold total over its lifetime — alongside Red Dead Redemption 2 (39 million total) and NBA 2K22 (five million total). Even smaller titles like The Outer Worlds (four million total) are doing very well for it. It's enough that the company raised its earnings projections for the full year today, despite delaying a massive Marvel game into next fiscal year — a move that would normally see projections take a hit.
All this put together makes it apparent that we're about to see a big ramp-up of game announcements from Take-Two, most likely beginning sometime next year if everything is to be marketed in time to make these projections come true. While plenty of those big releases are likely to be 2K Sports titles and possibly more adventurous new ideas like Midnight Suns and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, rumors continue to swirl about GTA 6 — a game that would certainly fit in with the "immersive core" description.
Fortunately for fans, the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition is coming up later this month, keeping the hope alive for now.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.