Take-Two Interactive’s fiscal second quarter was the last quiet one before Grand Theft Auto VI, and it looked like it. Net bookings fell 18% to $1.60 billion. Recurrent consumer spending, the money players put into games they already own, dropped 9%. None of that mattered much to anyone listening, because the company’s next quarter includes November 19, the day GTA VI ships on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
CEO Strauss Zelnick said the launch was ten days away and that pre-orders keep hitting unprecedented levels. Take-Two kept its full-year guidance for net bookings of $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion, and guided the December quarter to $3.35 billion to $3.50 billion. That is more than double the quarter it just reported.
The quarter itself
For the three months to September 30, GAAP net revenue was $1.50 billion, down from $1.77 billion. The net loss narrowed to $54.0 million, or $0.29 a share, from $133.9 million, helped by a $57.9 million tax benefit. Mobile, mostly Zynga, brought in $731.1 million of revenue, 49% of the total, and was down from $821.6 million. Console net bookings fell to $742.6 million from $907.9 million. NBA 2K was again among the biggest contributors, but the release gave no separate figure for it.
The weakness is mostly timing. Players and retailers hold back spending ahead of a launch this big, and last year’s quarter had stronger catalog sales. The mobile decline is the part worth watching after GTA VI, since it doesn’t have a launch excuse.
What the guidance implies
Take-Two’s full-year range implies roughly $1.5 billion to $1.9 billion of net bookings in the March quarter, after the December spike. The company expects full-year net income of $109 million to $142 million and EBITDA of about $1.02 billion to $1.08 billion. For the December quarter alone, it guides to net income of $250 million to $276 million, which would be its biggest profit quarter in years.
The guidance is deliberately conservative. Take-Two doesn’t publish unit forecasts. For scale, GTA V sold more than 11 million copies in its first day in 2013, and the series has only grown since. A launch on that scale, carried into a holiday quarter, leaves room to beat the range.
After November 19
The real test comes in the following quarters. GTA V turned into a recurring revenue machine through GTA Online, and investors are paying for the same thing again. Whether GTA VI’s online mode launches with the game or later, and how fast players start spending inside it, will matter more to Take-Two’s 2027 and 2028 numbers than first-week sales. The pipeline behind it includes Judas, a new BioShock, Project ETHOS, PGA TOUR 2K27 and WWE 2K27, all with dates still to come.
For the wider industry, a successful GTA VI pulls console spending forward across the whole holiday season, which can hurt smaller releases nearby. We looked at that effect in GTA VI and the November release window.