Take-Two Interactive's two biggest hopes for the three months ending June 30, Max Payne 3 and Spec Ops: The Line, both sold fewer copies than the company anticipated, CEO Strauss Zelnick said Tuesday.
The underperformance of these games was the primary driver of the company's $110.8 million loss for the quarter, on revenues of $226.1 million. This fell below Wall Street analyst expectations, which averaged around $255 million.
"As a hit-driven entertainment company, not every title we produce will meet our sales targets," Zelnick told investors in a Gamasutra-attended conference call.
Additionally, the company says that $15 million of the loss was due to "a one-time contractual obligation of $15 million," though the company did not specify the nature of this contract.
Upcoming high-profile releases for the company include BioShock Infinite, Borderlands 2, Xcom: Enemy Unknown and NBA 2K13. The company is also putting particular focus on its digital offerings, the revenues from which saw a 33 percent rise during the period.
Hm...I wonder if those Spec Ops: the Line sales will change for July. There has been a lot of word of mouth around this game, and I just recently picked it up during the Steam Summer Sale. And I know of a few other people that picked it up because all of the post buzz around the game. It might have legs.
It's a really solid title. It's not exactly innovative in the gameplay-department, but the story and character-building is very good imo. They're adding some coop features soon, too! O-joy!
Duke Nukem and LA Noire sold better than Max Payne 3 and Spec Ops in the same time frame. Consumers are holding onto their dollars tighter than ever before.
Not pointed out here, but Take Two has joined the field of publishers that are jumping aboard mobile options, and browser based gaming in Asia. They spent a significant amount of time talking about these two business ventures. Gaming is moving to a service based industry more and more.
For Max Payne 3 I am surprised. For SpecOps I am not. I still hope the latter sold well enough.
Though I found SpecOps rather disappointing in terms of gameplay. I say it contradicted the story, since it was below average. For example the just (somewhat very secretly) released Inversion is my definition of really "generic" - It doesn't do anything particular wrong, but neither does it anything particular right. SpecOps did particular wrong in various aspects of gameplay. I can't immerse into a war-critical world if the main gameplay exists of some bad mass-shootouts between one "hero" and a hundred of dumb bad guys.
Not pointed out here, but Take Two has joined the field of publishers that are jumping aboard mobile options, and browser based gaming in Asia. They spent a significant amount of time talking about these two business ventures. Gaming is moving to a service based industry more and more.
Though I found SpecOps rather disappointing in terms of gameplay. I say it contradicted the story, since it was below average. For example the just (somewhat very secretly) released Inversion is my definition of really "generic" - It doesn't do anything particular wrong, but neither does it anything particular right. SpecOps did particular wrong in various aspects of gameplay. I can't immerse into a war-critical world if the main gameplay exists of some bad mass-shootouts between one "hero" and a hundred of dumb bad guys.