Take-Two’s CEO claims that the two studios under their indie label (Private Division) have not been closed down, but it still feels like they’re not telling the truth.
In April, we heard that Take-Two was laying off 5% of its workforce, about 600 people, which meant the end of several unknown game projects, and then Bloomberg reported that Roll7 (OlliOlli, Rollerdrome) and Intercept Games (Kerbal Space Program 2) had been given Game Over. Here’s an IGN interview with Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two, who doesn’t really want to clarify the status of the two studios:
“We haven’t closed those studios, to be clear, and we’re always looking at our release schedule across all of our studios to make sure it makes sense. So we’re being very prudent because we’re in the middle of a cost reduction program that we’ve already completed and are now fully implementing. We’ve announced that we’re going to cut $165 million in existing and future costs, but we haven’t closed anything,” Zelnick said. IGN asked if this was a rebuttal to Bloomberg’s information, to which a Take Two spokesperson said that they wouldn’t go into a point-by-point explanation of how the 5% cuts were made…
In its annual report for the fiscal year, Take-Two stated that the company plans to release 40 games by the end of fiscal year 2027, not including the newly acquired Gearbox. Except that three months ago, in their last financial report, Take-Two’s schedule was 52 titles. So they may have thrown away a dozen games, but not all of them, as they may have delayed some beyond the 2027 fiscal year.
Take-Two President Karl Slatoff said, “Our updated release schedule reflects the actions of our recent cost reduction program, through which we canceled several titles in order to focus our efforts and resources on the franchises we believe have the best chance of achieving significant critical and commercial success. These titles were not core franchises and were not expected to have a material impact on our next bookings growth.” CFO Lainie Goldstein added: “On the operating expense front, we recently implemented a cost reduction program that is expected to deliver more than $155 million in annual cost savings across our business. As part of this effort, we have eliminated several projects in development that we did not expect to meet our financial benchmarks.”
So they said goodbye to some games… probably indie titles.
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