Take-Two is working on 93 new games, but not all of them will release

Take-Two Interactive wasn't kidding when it said its new games slate was the biggest in its history. The company is currently working on 93 new games (yes, ninety-three), but it's careful to say not all of these titles will actually launch.

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In its latest FY20 earnings report, Take-Two confirmed a gigantic 93-game slate. It seemed beyond belief. Ideally, GTA parent company wants to launch 93 games in the next 5 years. Obviously this includes the entire spectrum of game type and platform. We'll see re-releases, remasters, streaming-only games, F2P games, mobile games, and the big AAA heavy-hitters like GTA 6 and BioShock 4.

"Across our internally owned labels and outside development studio partners, we currently have 93 titles planned for release over the next five years through fiscal 2025," Take-Two President Karl Slatoff said.

Context is vital here.

In the same call, Take-Two President Karl Slatoff warned investors that not every game will see completion. Just because Take-Two is working on 93 games doesn't mean 93 games will come out. Titles get cancelled all the time in the industry, and a large portion of these games could simply fizzle out.

New IP makes up half of the slate, and Slatoff is careful to say that these IP are more likely to die out than core franchises. Take-Two is also investing less in new IP, and it's likely these games will be part of the Private Division label.

"And as we said before, there is a lot of new IP. And generally speaking, you can really expect -- on the new IP front, it's much more risky. And generally speaking, our development budgets are going to be lower for new IP," Slatoff said.

Slatoff also gave a very confusing breakdown of the 93 game slate. Here's how it breaks down:

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63 core games (includes AA, arcade, casual, and heavy-hitters)

• 18 bigger AAA-level titles
• 15 platform re-releases
• 17 mid-core/arcade games
• 13 casual experiences

Platform

• 21 mobile games
• 72 console/PC/streaming

93 games

• 46 new IPs
• 47 existing IPs

Buy vs F2P

• 67 Buy-to-play
• 26 free-to-play

Slatoff continues to add more context to the massive games slate:

"So there will be a wide range of investments across all of our types of releases we're doing, including core games. But the core games are really those looking for engaging experiences where you could play anywhere from five minutes to five hours at a time, right? So it's really things that set the -- AAA is probably the wrong way to commentate it because that does commentate investment, and that's not specifically what we're talking about here.

"And look, the more new projects that we have with new IP, you could probably expect that the completion rate to be lower than if it was just our existing franchises, and we do have a lot of IP in there.

"And just to stress again, those numbers assume that all those things come out, which we know is not going to be the case, but it also assumes that nothing gets added to the release slate, which also is not going to be the case.

"So this is a larger pipeline that we've had before. We've been talking about this for quite some time. And our expectation is we'd like to keep up this velocity. It's really important for us to build scale, and this is one way that we're doing it. We need more add backs."

So what is Take-Two working on?

Here's a few things we know for sure:

• Grand Theft Auto 6
• BioShock 4
• New IP from Michael Condrey's new 31st Union games studio
• Annual sports games