Recently, the gaming giant Electronic Arts was taken private in a $55 billion sale to an investor consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Could GTA 6 owner Take-Two be the next big company that gets acquired? Don’t bet on it, CEO Strauss Zelnick says.
Speaking to David Rubenstein, Zelnick said Take-Two’s business results have proven that it “can do very well as an independent company.”
He said Take-Two’s business is already “at scale” and healthy enough financially with a “terrific balance sheet,” as he put it.
“We are not in a place where we need to be part of a bigger organization to be competitive. And in the entertainment business, scale matters,” he said.
Zelnick said companies that do less than a billion in annual revenue might have issues with developing, marketing, and distributing games at scale. Not only that, but companies that don’t generate a lot of money might not be able to survive the realities of the creative business, in which sometimes your product flops.
“But once you’re over a billion dollars in annual revenue, and we’re way beyond that point. Our guidance is $8 billion to $8.2 billion this fiscal year, additional scale doesn’t seem to help you succeed.”
In early 2008, Electronic Arts privately pursued a buyout of Take-Two, but after the GTA and BioShock company rejected it, EA went public in an attempt to get a deal done. Later that year, EA abandoned its plans to try to buy Take-Two after the GTA company said it was worth more and EA refused to increase its bid.
In 2019, it was rumored that Sony was attempting to buy Take-Two, but that was ultimately deemed to be unconfirmed market chatter and not a formal bid.
Take-Two has a market cap of more than $42 billion, and that is expected to grow in the year ahead, so it would seemingly take a lot of money to convince Take-Two to sell. Going forward, Zelnick has teased that new GTA games could release even faster, and that could be a positive for the company’s financials.
GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Preloading is underway now, and that’s good news because the game has a massive file size.
