Take-Two still wants to bring its biggest IP to mobile

Two years since it completed its takeover of Zynga, Take-Two is still trying to figure out a way to bring its biggest franchises to mobile.

The $12.7 billion deal, which is the second-largest acquisition in video game history, brought Take-Two’s blockbuster console and PC franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Borderlands, NBA 2K and BioShock under the same roof as Zynga’s hugely popular social gaming brands including FarmVille and Words With Friends.

“Perhaps most importantly we have the ability together, from both a development and a publishing point of view, to optimise the creation of new titles based on Take-Two’s core intellectual property,” Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said when the deal was announced.

“We believe we have the best collection of console and PC intellectual property in the interactive entertainment business and it’s basically nearly entirely un-exploited from mobile and free-to-play around the world.”

During an interview at a TD Cowen conference this week, Zelnick was asked whether Take-Two had made any progress towards fulfilling this ambition, or even whether the goal was still part of the company’s multi-year pipeline plan.

“You’re kind to ask it that way,” he said (transcribed by VGC). “What you’re really saying is, ‘you haven’t done that, what happened?’ And the answer is, and I said it at the time, I said, ‘listen, that is one opportunity to create revenue synergies, but arguably it’s not the best one because even mobile titles based on traditional core established IP can fail, and the biggest titles in mobile are of course native.’

“Now, what people are really saying, they didn’t say it this way, is, ‘why don’t you just do what Call of Duty Mobile did?’ But the answer is, Call of Duty is a superset, never mind a subset, a superset of one. Basically everything else has paled by comparison in our space.”

Call of Duty Mobile was released in November 2019 and had been downloaded over 650 million times as May 2022, according to publisher Activision