Take-Two Interactive announces layoffs due to cost reduction program

Layoffs continue to be the plague of the video game industry. This time it’s Grand Theft Auto VI publisher, Take-Two Interactive, which has announced a series of layoffs. On Tuesday, April 16 the company announced a round of layoffs in a SEC filing at the end of the business day.

According to the filing, five percent of the staff will be laid off. Take-Two employes approximately 11,000 individuals. The company’s 2023 annual report referenced about 11,580 employees and if those numbers held true, that means about 600 were laid off in this round.

To go along with the layoffs, several projects worth nearly $140 million were canceled. These moves were defined as “rationalizing its pipeline” and “streaming its organizational structure” within those filings. The cuts also involved office space reductions which has led to some believing that the Take-Two offices will also be closed. This is the second round of layoffs within Take-Two in less than a year and comes less than a month after Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that the company had “no current plans” for layoffs when speaking to Alex Stedman of IGN.

“The hardest thing to do is lay off colleagues,” Zelnick said in the interview dated March 20. “And we have no current plans.”

Back in November of 2023, Zelnick spoke of growth for Take-Two, pointing toward what he described as a stronger future.

“We’ve already gotten through the right-sizing we felt we needed to do,” Zelnick said. “We expect to be in growth mode going forward.”

These layoffs come on the opposite end of some interesting moves by the company. Take-Two recently announced plans to acquire Gearbox Entertainment, the group behind the popular Borderlands series. Plus, there’s the development of Grand Theft Auto VI, which many think will see historic numbers when it releases in 2025. Along with that big game, Take-Two Interactive also has BioShock and Mafia games in development, two other well-received series.

Take-Two reported $1.2 billion in earnings last quarter, which is an increase compared to that same time year in 2023. Zelnik also benefited from the company’s success in 2023, as he received more than $40 million in compensation due to reaching specific metrics, such as the amount of money spent on microtransactions.

Layoffs continue to be the bane of the technology and video game industries, with thousands of people laid off since the start of 2024. This is on the heels of 2023 where several companies made cuts, kicking off the alarming behavior. And this comes as revenue figures continue to show strong overall performance for the gaming industry.