Last time you decided petting a dog was better than entering cyberspace. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. And you probably don’t even notice how I’m sulking out here in cyberspace because you’re so busy tickling some lousy stinky baby mind. Okay, okay, whatever. This week, everything is dedicated to the tasks set for you. Which is better: fighting your doppelganger or additional challenges that give rewards in advance?

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Take-Two Interactive today reported its financial results for the fourth quarter and the full year ended March 31, with the company continuing to post strong revenue growth thanks to the Zynga acquisition but continuing to suffer losses.

Numbers:

Take-Two Results for Fiscal Year 2023

• Net Revenue: Up 53% to $5.35 billion.
• Net orders: up 55% to $5.28 billion.
• Net loss: US$1.12 billion compared to a net profit of US$418 million in the previous year.

Take-Two results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023

• Net Revenue: Up 56% to $1.45 billion.
• Net orders: up 65% to $1.39 billion.
• Net loss: US$610 million compared to a net profit of US$111 million in the previous year.

Take-Two Forecast for Fiscal Year 2024

• Net revenue: from fixed to 2%
• Net bookings: up to 3-5%
• Net losses: $518 million to $477 million.

Basic moments:

The most important drivers in the fourth quarter were familiar faces led by NBA 2K23, Grand Theft Auto Online/Grand Theft Auto 5, via hyper-casual games, Empires & Puzzles, Toon Blast, Red Dead Redemption 2/Red Dead Online; WWE 2K23, dragon fusion and words with friends.

In terms of sales news, Grand Theft Auto 5 has currently shipped 180 million units worldwide and Red Dead Redemption 2 is up to 53 million units.

To date, NBA 2K23 has also reached 11 million units, a new franchise record at this point in the game’s life, and also boasts the highest virtual currency sales.

While the results of these games helped lift the company’s fourth-quarter net orders above the forecast range of $1.31 billion to $1.36 billion, they failed to deter Take-Two from a similar increase in losses than expected.

Take-Two had forecast a fourth-quarter net loss of up to $214 million, but beat them to post a net loss of $610 million.

The company attributed the deeper-than-expected losses to impairment losses of $465.3 million on acquisition-related intangible assets and $54.2 million on capitalized software development costs for unreleased and canceled games.

While the company is forecasting net losses for the current fiscal year as well, investors have something to look forward to, saying net bookings will rise to $8 billion in fiscal 2025, with additional growth expected in fiscal 2026.

In our pre-briefing with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, we asked if this $8 billion goal is achievable without the release of a major new Grand Theft Auto game. (Grand Theft Auto 6 has been announced, but the company hasn’t given a release date yet.)

“We don’t talk about specific names,” Zelnick says. “We believe this is very achievable. As you know, we rarely talk about our years. And when we do that, it’s because we have a high degree of confidence. This is a reflection of a process we have invested in over the years. . We’re starting to see this come to fruition in FY24, and then in FY25, we expect big things to happen.”

He notes that the company currently plans to release 36 games in fiscal year 25 and 26.

As of fiscal year 24, Take-Two expects to release three “immersive core” games by the end of March 2024: NBA 2K24, WWE 2K24, and “a highly anticipated new IP from one of our flagship studios.”

There are also two “midcore/arcade” games in development this year, one of which (Lego 2K Drive) will be released this week.

Take-Two recently canceled the release of Midnight Suns for the Nintendo Switch. With rumors growing that Nintendo is preparing a successor system next year, we ask Zelnick if Take-Two plans to continue supporting the Switch beyond this year, when it already has the Lego 2K Drive and Zynga Star Wars Hunters.

“Yes, I think we will continue to support him,” he replies.

Another console question we asked Zelnick is about mid-gen console updates. Around this point in the last console cycle, Microsoft first announced that there would be an Xbox One X, and Sony soon followed with the PlayStation 4 Pro. We ask if we should expect to see such iterative hardware this time around, and if it affected Take-Two’s business in the previous generation, and if so, in what way.

“It probably will,” Zelnick says, “and they haven’t really impacted the business much.”

While Take-Two’s line of consoles and PCs is getting a lot of attention, the company’s outlook for the current year also highlights just how much the Zynga acquisition has changed the business since it closed a year ago this month.

In fiscal year 22, mobile devices accounted for just 12% of Take-Two’s orders. In fiscal year 23, that figure rose to 47% and the company expects that figure to rise to 53% this year.

Zelnick acknowledges the shift, but says it didn’t take much effort from the top management of the company to make it happen.

“We have always had a very decentralized approach to our labels and [Zynga president] Frank Gibo continues to lead Zynga in an extremely independent manner,” he says.

“We look forward to providing support and we do have centralized features as you can imagine, including data analytics and our consumer database that can benefit all of our labels. In terms of existence, Frank and his team lead and manage Zynga; we think this is the best way to create value in the mobile space.”