“The hardest thing to do is to lay off colleagues, and we have no current plans,” CEO Strauss Zelnick stated last month.
An SEC filing that was made on Tuesday revealed that Take-Two Interactive intends to terminate approximately 600 people, which is equivalent to five percent of its staff, before the end of the year. Also, the studio is pulling out of other projects that are currently in development. The implementation of these changes is anticipated to cost between 160 and 200 million dollars, and it is anticipated that Take-Two will realize yearly savings of 16.5 million dollars as a result.
Take-Two is a formidable force in the video game business. In addition to being the owner of Grand Theft Auto, the corporation is also the parent company of Rockstar Games, 2K, Private Division, Zynga, and Gearbox. In the year 2023, it reported a revenue of $5.3 billion, which is a roughly $2 billion increase over the previous year’s figures. Take-Two reportedly reached an agreement to acquire Gearbox, the company that is responsible for Borderlands, for a sum of $460 million just a few weeks ago. During the year 2025, the corporation is making preparations to release Grand Theft Auto VI, a move that is expected to bring in billions of dollars on its own.
A series of layoffs was implemented by Take-Two in 2023 across Private Division, the independent label that was responsible for the games Kerbal Space Program, The Outer Worlds, and Rollerdrome, as well as other in-house studios throughout the company.
It is anticipated that 8,800 individuals have lost their jobs in the video game industry so far in the year 2024, while a total of 10,500 employees in the industry were laid off in the year 2023. It is disheartening to acknowledge that these numbers break records. For example, Sony laid off over 900 employees at PlayStation in February, Microsoft laid off approximately 1,900 employees throughout its gaming division in January, and Riot Games let go of more than 500 employees in the same month. These are just some of the most recent layoffs that have occurred in the AAA industry. Take-Two comes in at number one on this list at the moment.
Executives from Take-Two have been dropping hints about a “significant cost reduction program” that will be implemented this year; yet, prior to today, they chose to avoid answering queries regarding widespread layoffs. Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of the company, stated during an investor call in March that “the hardest thing to do is to lay off colleagues and we have no current plans.”