It’s that time of year again and we’re going to pretend to know what we’re talking about by mentioning the Take-Two earnings call, which happened early this morning in NYC.
Take-Two Interactive, as the parent company and distributor of Rockstar Games, hold a financial meeting every few months to inform shareholders of their earnings. This morning’s meeting in NYC was an annual report of their financial year and an outlook to the future. Of course, we never normally listen to these for news, because it’s not that kind of conference and Take-Two will never announce anything related to their gaming catalogue *before* Rockstar Games do, however with the delay announcement yesterday we had a listen in just for… research purposes.
First and foremost, the most mind-blowing figure to come out of the earnings call was that Grand Theft Auto V has now sold 80 million units across the world, placing it 4th of the best selling games in history, and in 1st against other triple A games in the list. It’s not a complete surprise that the most important gaming franchise ever created continues to sell it’s most recent game well, but at 4 years old now its success should absolutely be highlighted wherever possible. GG GTAV!
Now onto the Red Dead Redemption 2 stuff. As mentioned, with the delay announcement yesterday they did have to bring it up in their earnings call to inform shareholders so that they didn’t expect a sudden influx of earnings from sales in Fall 2017, since that’s when RDR2 was previously set to release. They repeated Rockstar’s apology from the announcement, but of course emphasised that Rockstar only want to bring the best game possible to the table, and we completely understand this statement.
They did however mention something else very interesting about Red Dead Redemption 2; they specifically stated that it would be releasing in “fiscal 2019”. Take-Two’s financial year runs from 1st April to 31st March, like a tax year, meaning we’re currently in fiscal 2018. This mention of fiscal 2019 means that Red Dead Redemption 2 will release sometime after 1st April 2018, so we can rule out January-March. All Rockstar have mentioned thus far is the “spring 2018” release window, but our bets are put on May 2018, since that would match the original release month of Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Revolver.
TL;DR: Take-Two confirm Red Dead Redemption 2 is releasing in fiscal year 2019, meaning any date from 1st April 2018 onwards.
Source: Take2Games.com