Take-Two Interactive has revealed plans to implement a “cost reduction program”, which loosely translates to a firing of nearly 600 employees – roughly 5% of its workforce. This plan also includes “rationalizing and eliminating several projects in development” as part of a desire to “streamline its organizational structure” – in other words, canning stuff AND staff for the sake of saving money, in regular human speak.
All these details have been revealed as part of an end of business SEC filing, with the terms laid out in pretty stark black and white. People and projects are being chopped.
Take-Two, the company behind the Grand Theft Auto video games, plans to fire 5% its workforce and drop several projects to cut costs https://t.co/nyXMvOV4Lt
— Bloomberg (@business) April 16, 2024
The documents state that the company is hoping for savings of up to $200 million as part of the cuts, with roughly $140 million coming from the cancelled projects and another $35 million from employee related costs. A very lofty pill to swallow when you take into account the recent expenditure of $460 million to acquire Gearbox back in March.
This is further made difficult to process when you take into account that an earnings call back in February of this year saw Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick make mention that “We have no current plans for layoffs”. This was compounded with an IGN interview seeing a similar quote from Zelnick saying “The hardest thing to do is to lay off colleagues, and we have no current plans.”
Clearly a lot has happened since then, because 5% of your working staff is not an insignificant number. There is also a lot of speculation on what projects may have been in the pipeline to be cut, considering the development houses within the Take-Two umbrella.
With the impending release of Grand Theft Auto VI, the cynic in me wonders if the company is targeting a larger cut of profit by reducing expenditure margins beforehand – like pirates killing off crewmates to increase their share of treasure, considering the rumored target of a January-March 2025 release date for the title. By any metric, it is another tragic blow in a period that is decidedly unfriendly to the people that make games happen.
Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games
