Take Two Is a Bright Spot in Tough October

The NPD Group data for the month of October, released last week, were anything but good. Overall, the videogaming industry has shrunk by about 19% over the same period during 2008, with price cuts failing to drive up sales volume for the PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360, and with customers buying less videogames than ever because of the lower disposable income they can direct towards entertainment.

And with Electronic Arts laying off 1,500 employees, it appears to be a tough time for publishers. But one company that does not seem to be feeling the pinch is Take Two, which has seen a rise of 70% in the volume of games it shipped during the month, as revealed by analyst Doug Creutz, who is working for the Cowen Group. He said that “Take-Two's October results are an example of how publishers can succeed despite a difficult industry environment.”

Their surprise hit is Borderlands, developed by Gearbox. The game has managed to sell close to 550,000 units on both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 during the month and is projected to sell more than 1.5 million units before the end of the year.

The game allows the player to explore the planet of Pandora and shoot a variety of villains with one of the random generated weapons. The title places heavy emphasis on cooperative play and has been described as a role playing shooter by the company.

The good performance of Take Two is also driven by sales of NBA 2K10, part of its sports line up, which sold 575,000 units in North America in one month, a 60% increase over last year's release, managing to outsell NBA Live 10 by about four to one. It also helped that Take Two outed the disk-based Episodes of Liberty City allowing players to get both The Lost & Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony.