When asked by an investor on the call to elaborate on how the last year had impacted the number, Take-Two president Karl Slatoff seemed to indicate that “93 titles in five years” as a benchmark had begun in 2020, and was not simply being moved up as a new goal to start in 2021.“The ’93 titles’ that we put out there was a snapshot, it was a moment in time,” he said. “And we really haven’t given any updates on that since then. Of course, things move in and out all the time, it hasn’t really been that long since then, so you can’t really expect that there’s going to be a significant amount of movement, but I can tell you for sure there are some things that have fallen out and some things that are back in. But generally speaking, these are still pretty good numbers. We do expect that this pipeline will be fluid as we get things through various milestones, so it will be changing over time, but we haven’t provided any additional updates other than the initial announcement that we made.”
He also broke down some stats on the company’s expectations for those 93 titles, which are incidentally again the same stats he gave in May of last year: 63 titles are “core gaming experiences,” 17 are “mid-core” and 13 are “casual.” He expects 47 of the releases will be existing IP, while the rest are new IP. 72 are planned for console, PC, and streaming services, with seven of those 72 crossing over to mobile; 23 of the 93 will be on mobile only. And 67 of the games will be premium releases, while 26 are free-to-play.
This is not to say Take-Two hasn’t made progress toward that goal of 93 releases in the last year. In 2020, its subsidiaries released a number of games, including Disintegration from Private Division, and numerous games from 2K Games including Carnival Games, NBA 2K21, XCOM: Chimera Squad, WWE 2K Battlegrounds, and Mafia: Definition Edition. It also released various DLC packs (which Slatoff had previously slated did not count toward the 93 game releases) as well as older games re-releasing on new platforms, such as Borderlands 3 and NBA 2K21 coming to next-gen platforms, and BioShock: The Collection coming to Nintendo Switch — it is unclear if these would be included in the 93.
It is also likely that this figure is indicative of a milestone set in the current fiscal year, which Take-Two is still in the middle of and which ends on March 31, 2020. It’s possible that the company gives a more full update on its progress toward the 93 game releases in its next quarter financials, which will include its full-year earnings and goals for the new fiscal year.
Upcoming games that could potentially be among this number include the not-yet-announced GTA 6, a new BioShock game, Kerbal Space Program 2 (which has been delayed to at least 2022), and the usual annual slate of 2K Sports titles including NBA 2K.
Take-Two reported another strong quarter of earnings, including new record milestones for GTA Online and Red Dead Online, with the former seeing engagement numbers rise following the release of the Cayo Perico Heist late last year.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
