Take-Two posts modest Q1 growth as it hypes 'most ambitious development pipeline in our history'

Take-Two today released its financial results for its first fiscal quarter 2025, covering the three months ending June 30, with bookings up marginally but with deeper losses.

The FY Q1 numbers

• Net revenue: $1.34 billion (up 4% year-over-year)
• Net loss: $262 million (compared to a $206 million loss in the year-ago quarter)
• Total net bookings: $1.22 billion (up 1% year-over-year)

The Highlights:

For the financial quarter ending June 30, Take-Two delivered small growth in bookings and revenue, but saw losses grow, primarily due to the on-going amortization of acquired intangibles related to the firm's acquisition of Zynga.

The firm continues to focus on what's to come, with references to 2025's Grand Theft Auto 6, plus detailing that it will release 24 games over the next two fiscal years. This is made up of 15 'immersive core releases' (including six sports titles), one independent game, five mobile releases and three new iterations of older games.

The company reiterated its bookings guidance for the full year of $5.55 to $5.65 billion, but anticipates stronger GAAP losses. And CEO Strauss Zelnick has told GamesIndustry.biz he anticipates "sequential growth in fiscal 26 and 27."

"The fiscal year has got off to a good start," he states. "The first quarter is in-line with expectations, with guidance, with consensus, and we have reiterated our guidance."

For the quarter, the firm continues to show growth in digital, with 83% of its revenue coming from what it calls 'recurrent consumer spending' (areas such as DLC and microtransactions). Overall, digital accounted for 97% of its overall bookings (up 2%) while 82% of console games sales were sold digitally (up from 80% during the same period the year before).

The usual candidates drove growth for Take-Two, including NBA 2K24, Grand Theft Auto Online, Grand Theft Auto 5, Toon Blast, Empires & Puzzles, Match Factory, Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online, Words with Friends and Merge Dragons.

Zynga has seen success with Match Factory, which grew 50% in terms of bookings over the last quarter, while Toon Blast also continued to grow over the previous financial year, the firm tells us. However, there were some declines in the firm's hyper-casual mobile titles, and with Empires and Puzzles.

For Rockstar, Grand Theft Auto Online was down year-on-year, but beat Take-Two's projections. Meanwhile, the GTA+ subscription service saw 'strong double digit' growth over the previous year, boosted by the inclusion of classic Rockstar games including LA Noire, the firm says.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has now surpassed 65 million shipments

For the 2K label, NBA 2K24 has now shipped nearly 11 million units, which is below last year's 13 million. Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick remains confident that the game's overall performance will be "roughly flat" compared with NBA 2K23.

"There were any number of differences year-over-year," he says. "There is no question that overall sales were down for NBA 2K. Gen 9 platforms were all up. Now, those headwinds will have disappeared before this year's release."

The firm says that WWE 2K25 has "enhanced its profitability", through in-game updates and highlighted the critical praise for its new TopSpin 2K25 release, although didn't share details of its commercial performance.

Elsewhere, the firm has narrowed down the release window of upcoming strategy game Civilization VII, which is due to come out before the end of the financial year in March 2025.