Take-Two Interactive Sells Private Division, CEO Reacts to Trump

Take-Two Interactive has sold its “Tales of the Shire” developer Private Division. The video game publisher revealed the deal in its fiscal 2025 second-quarter earnings results Wednesday. The company did not disclose who it sold the studio to and what the sale price was.

“We recently made the strategic decision to sell our Private Division label so we could focus our resources on growing our core businesses for the long term,” Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick tells Variety. “So as part of that transaction, the buyer purchased substantially all of Private Division’s existing and unreleased titles. However, Take Two continues to support ‘No Rest for the Wicked,’ which launched in April on early access. Importantly, we’re grateful to the contributions that the Private Division team made to Take Two, and we’re confident that they’ll continue to achieve success.”

While Take-Two has gone another earnings cycle without narrowing the release window for “Grand Theft Auto 6” down from Fall 2025 to a specific date, Zelnick notes that it will not cross paths with the release of “Borderlands 4,” which is set to be out between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026 (Take Two’s 2026 fiscal year). “I think it’s safe to say that we wouldn’t, and no one would, stack up huge releases unnecessarily,” Zelnick said.

Wall Street forecast $1.43 billion in net bookings, according to analyst consensus data provided by LSEG, formerly Refinitiv. Take-Two reported $1.47 billion in revenue.

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Take-Two revealed its most recent quarterly results Wednesday, the day after the presidential race between now-President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. When asked about the results and how they could affect future M&A moves (on the heels of Microsoft’s $75.4 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which was closed during President Joe Biden’s tenure) within the gaming industry while speaking with Variety, Zelnick emphasized that while Take-Two is “an entertainment company, not a politics company,” he does believe the change in administration will lead to a “more sensible FTC.”

“I believe in the democratic process. By all accounts, this was a free, fair and secure election,” Zelnick says. “The future is also just that. So we always have that time together as a nation and as a company. We’re an entertainment company, not a politics company. We’re focused on our mission. … I think that the President-elect has made it very plain that he believes in reducing regulation. I do believe that the FTC was misguided during President Biden’s term, and I do think that the FTC tried to impede some transactions that were beneficial for both the companies in question and the economy at large, and the FTC lost all those cases since. So I do think that, depending on what the specific topic is, deregulation can be a positive, and I am certainly looking forward to more sensible FTC.”

In regards to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike against video game publishers, Zelnick says: “We take these things very seriously, so I don’t want to be cavalier about the situation. We do believe that it’s both possible and likely that we can come to terms in a way that will be mutually beneficial to the parties. We certainly have both that hope and expectation.”

Following a “disappointing” box office for the “Borderlands” movie (based on the popular franchise developed by Gearbox, which was acquired by Take Two earlier this year), Zelnick says Take-Two is still interested in future film or TV adaptations of its IP.

“We have selectively licensed intellectual properties. As you know, we have a deal pending on ‘Bioshock’ for example,” Zelnick says. “And while the ‘Borderlands’ movie was indeed disappointing, it was good for our catalog sales of ‘Borderlands’ titles. So we would prefer to have a huge hit. As you know, we didn’t have a financial exposure to the negative. So we are selective for exactly the reason that you just cannot control these outcomes. And we prefer to control our own destiny. However, we still will license selectively.”