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A $500 Million Week for Grand Theft Auto (nytimes.com)
20 points by ideas101 on May 7, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


So sick. The scale of that is incredible. Facebook and MySpace don't make that much together in a year...

And somehow this company is only worth $2B?


While $500 million in sales is extremely impressive, they're still in the red when it comes to net income: http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:TTW...

Additionally, GTA sales aren't recurring each year and although the GTA effect will certainly help them this year there's a lot of time between GTA releases to account for. I'd say $2 billion is pretty reasonable for a company that lost $138 million in FY07.


This really highlights just how tricky the video game business is. If any other software product could sell $500M in one week, the company would be in a great position. It makes one wonder if the current trend of such grand-scale commercial games is sustainable.


The bottom line is so-so, but the top line's great for a company like Take Two. EA can afford to spend money to get hits, they just need more of them.


The game development company I worked for until a few months ago was bought out in early 2007, at a valuation that was far below the total value of the development contracts it was doing. I'd estimate the valuation to have been about a third or quarter of yearly revenue, although I had nothing to do with the financial side or the acquisition, so I might be somewhat off.

Basically, there seems to be very little confidence that most game companies will ever be sustainably profitable. It's the hit-drivenness and therefore riskiness of the business that's discouraging everyone from investing. There is a slow trend towards smaller development budgets, but it's certainly not coming from within the existing players, profitable or not. (let's face it, having ~70 people work on one project for 2½ years is pretty insane if you have no idea whether anyone will even like it)


Does Take-Two has such a week at least once a year? Perhaps - yes..




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