Take-Two says cancelled games weren’t ‘core franchise’ titles

Take-Two‘s updated release slate of upcoming games, published on Thursday, includes 12 fewer games than the last time it was shown.

As part of its earnings report for its fiscal year 2024, the publisher showed a slide stating that it has a total of 40 titles planned by the end of fiscal year 2027, not including the pending acquisition of Gearbox.

The last time Take-Two showed its release slate, in February of this year, the company said it had 52 games in development.

Though this doesn’t necessarily indicate that the 12 missing games have all been cancelled – some may have been delayed beyond the end of fiscal year 2027 – it did confirm during its earnings call that it had at least cancelled some titles.

“Our updated release schedule reflects the actions of our recent cost-reduction programme, through which we cancelled several titles to focus our efforts and resources on the franchises we believe represent our best opportunities to achieve significant critical and commercial success,” Take-Two president Karl Slatoff said.

“These titles did not include any of our core franchises and were not expected to materially affect our next bookings growth.”

This was reiterated later in the call by CFO Lainie Goldstein, who said: “In terms of operating expenses, we recently implemented a cost-reduction programme that is expected to deliver over $155 million in annual cost savings across our entire business.

“As part of these efforts, we have eliminated several projects in development that we did not anticipate would meet our financial benchmarks.”

In April, Take-Two confirmed that it would be cutting 5% of its workforce – around 600 people – and that the cuts would result in the cancellation of unnamed in-development game projects.