Take Two Reveals $50m 360 Content Deal, Wii/DS Focus

In an investor call following its June 11th earnings report, Take-Two executives revealed that Microsoft are paying the company $50 million for its exclusive Grand Theft Auto IV Xbox 360 episodic content, and noted a stronger company-wide focus on the DS and Wii. As transcribed by stock market site SeekingAlpha, Take-Two CFO Lainie Goldstein explained the Microsoft payments in response to a question on the episodic content. "The first 25 (million) is for the first episodic content package that’s supposed to go out and that is in March of ’08," explained Goldstein of the GTA content exclusive to the Xbox 360. "That’s why it moved into current because it’s in the next 12 months. The second 25 will be for the second episodic, the episode, and that will be later in fiscal ’08," Goldstein continued. Later in the call, when asked to clarify Take-Two's overarching strategy for the Wii, chairman Strauss Zelnick explained that little deliberation was necessary to formulate plans. "To be perfectly frank," said Zelnick, "I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to realize what’s going on with Wii and DS. I will tell you that very quickly we turned to both 2K and to Rockstar and said guys, we need a DS strategy and a Wii strategy and we are working on it. As we get into the next quarter and into budget season for 2008, everybody in this company is completely focused on it." "Having said that," he continued, "development cycles are long. Sports aren’t as good as games develop for specific platforms but we are looking at all of them across the board for Wii and DS. I will tell you that Carnival Games that we’ve announced for the Wii has gotten a lot of attention in the marketplace, as well as with our first-party partners. So we are pretty excited about that." "We have some -- some have been announced, some Wii titles have been announced and we are working to put more out on the Wii and DS," he concluded.