Take-Two's Talks 'Milestone' Year, 'Prospective' Kinect Support

Calling the profitable period ending October 31 "a milestone year for Take Two," the major game publisher was bullish on both its current position and the state of the larger industry. In an earnings conference call on which Gamasutra listened in, chairman Strauss Zelnick said Take-Two had a "higher number of [catalog] units per SKU than any other third party publisher in the industry." The strong fiscal results led CEO Ben Feder to say the management team had created what was "truly a new company, in a stronger position than at any time in our history." Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption was a big part of the publisher's successful year, shipping over 8 million copies so far, according to the company. That number includes roughly 1.1 million in shipments since September, showing relatively strong staying power for the May release. October release NBA 2K11 has also been a strong performer, the company said, shipping over 3 million units worldwide thus far. Better than expected performance for MLB 2K11 also helped drive the 2K Sports division to a profit for the fiscal year. Take-Two also used the call to stress overall digital sales of $94 million for the fiscal year, driven by downloadable content for titles such as Borderlands, Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. The company credited its annual profit -- the first in years for a period without a major Grand Theft Auto release -- to a newly diversified game portfolio which provides a broader revenue base. Still, the company revealed that a full 46 percent of its revenues for fiscal 2010 came from Rockstar, a proportion expected to rise to 52 percent for the newly aligned fiscal year ending March 31, 2011. Though many observers see weakness in the wider game industry's performance so far in 2010, COO Slatoff noted that, aside from sectors like music and portable games, the industry is actually doing quite well. The healthy growth rates for both PS3 and Xbox 360 software and hardware "goes against the sentiment that the core market is cooling off," Slatoff said. Looking forward, the company expressed cautious interest in making games for new technologies from Nintendo and Microsoft, though stopped short of making any product announcements. ii¿½i¿½Obviously weii¿½i¿½re excited about the 3DS," Slatoff said. "Weii¿½i¿½re looking at what it can do for the consumer market... and the same holds true for Kinect.ii¿½i¿½ Slatoff added that while he thought going back to add Kinect support to existing releases didn't make much sense, he saw possibilities for Kinect support in future releases for some major Take Two franchises. "We're looking at it on more of a prospective basis," he said.