In-game spending on Take-Two games jumped 15 percent during Q1 2022

Take-Two’s quarterly earnings report today landed with good news for the company. Along with the announcement that Grand Theft Auto V crossed 150 million copies sold, Take-Two shared better-than-expected financial numbers that indicated a strong first quarter for its 2022 fiscal year.

GAAP net revenue did decrease slightly year-over-year—dropping two percent from $831.3 million to $813.3 million. But buried in that drop is an interesting data point: Take-Two has seen a 15 percent year-over-year increase in in-game spending (dubbed “recurrent consumer spending” in its report), as more players spend money on virtual currency, add-on content, and other in-game purchases.

That’s a steady boost in activity for a company that’s seen rising revenue built on the back of digital spending. (It closed out its 2021 fiscal year with 87 percent of $3.4 billion net revenue flowing in just from digital sources.) In this quarter, that in-game spending accounted for 70 percent of total GAAP net revenue.

Games like NBA 2K21, Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Redemption Online, Borderlands 3, Dragon City, and Two Dots were among the largest contributors to GAAP net revenue.

Elsewhere, digitally-delivered GAAP net revenue increased 1% to $740.8 million, up from $735.6 million this time last year. GAAP net income increased 72% to $152.3 million, up from $88.5 million from the same period in Q1 2021.

Net bookings (revenue minus the deferred income associated with some game content purchases) declined 29 percent year-over-year to $711.4 million, compared to $996.2 million from last year’s first fiscal quarter.

Digital net bookings declined 26 percent to $680.4 million, compared to $924.5 million from the same quarter last year.

Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick described the released numbers as “positive momentum” for the publisher, and that they beat internal expectations for the quarter. He also noted that due to some schedule shuffling for its upcoming releases, some of its guidance for future revenue in fiscal year 2022 might be shuffled into 2023.

“We believe that we will achieve sequential growth in fiscal 2023 and establish new record levels of operating results over the next few years,” he noted in the company’s report.

Take-Two, like other publishers, is beginning to experience the downswing of last year’s pandemic-driven revenue growth as more players venture out in the world, away from games like Grand Theft Auto Online.

Even as some numbers take a dip from the unexpected highs of last year’s stay-at-home orders, it’s interesting to see the company boast its increase in recurrent consumer spending. Even if players are getting out of the house, they still seem to be spending their money in Take-Two’s virtual shops.