NBA 2K11 and Red Dead Push Take Two Forward

Publisher Take Two Interactive has managed to beat expectations and announced good financial results for the 2010 holiday quarter, with profits reaching 40.8 million dollars for the period, which is about 7 percent more than during the previous period in 2009.

Take Two says that revenue actually went down, reaching 334.3 million dollars, down a similar 7% compared to 2009, but they beat the target that the company set for itself.

The best performing video games for Take Two were NBA 2K11, which managed to sell 4 million units to gamers, Red Dead Redemption, which continued to be interesting thanks to the launch of the Undead Nightmare Pack, which arrived on its own disk, Gran Theft Auto IV: Complete, Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition and Civilization V.

The publisher has also pointed out to strong sales of digitally distributed content for Red Dead Redemption, Civilization V and GTA.

Strauss Zelnick, who is the chairman of the board and the chief executive officer of Take Two, said, “Strong holiday sales enabled Take-Two to continue to deliver better-than-expected revenue and earnings in the third quarter. Our results year-to-date clearly demonstrate the company's ability to translate its world-class creative resources and diverse portfolio of triple-A franchises into meaningful profits.”

Analysts pushed the executives of Take Two to talk about their plans for the upcoming Nintendo 3DS handheld and for the PlayStation Portable 2, but the company declined to make any official announcements, saying that both of them are “very compelling.”

In the following months, Take Two has high hopes for sports-based games like Top Spin 4 and Major League Baseball 2K11, which are coming in March and should boost its year-over-year sales.

The company also revealed that at the moment the PlayStation 3 represented 27 percent of the revenue generated, a 50 percent increase over the situation in late 2009, with the companies presence decreasing on the Wii and the Xbox 360.