Take-Two Interactive today released its quarterly earnings report for Q1 FY25, in which it revealed that its bookings for the year were flat compared with Q1 FY24. Following this report, the company held its earnings call in which it fielded questions, including one about Take-Two’s view on user-generated content (UGC) across its different franchises. According to CEO Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two is not planning to focus on UGC in the near-future and doesn’t consider UGC a major factor in the company’s future.
Zelnick said during the call (in response to a question from Oppenheimer & Co about UGC and modding), “We’ve been very open-minded and we certainly are very excited about many things our users are delivering in their engagement with our titles and other people’s titles. Obviously we’re excited about what we see in the modding community for GTA, and we think that’s pretty exciting. At the end of the day, entertainment companies need to bring great entertainment to consumers. That is the starting point. And I’m not a believer that the industry will turn into a UGC-driven industry.”
User-generated content has become a fixture of the games industry in the past few years, as businesses have sprung from creating content on UGC-friendly platforms. Zelnick acknowledged these, saying, “However, for certain titles, for example Roblox, they are really more platforms than they are individual entertainment titles. And I think at this company we pride ourselves on making the best entertainment of any sort [sound muffled] and if consumers want to add to that and enhance that for their own use, generally speaking we would like to enable that behavior.”
As Zelnick acknowledged, modding is a staple of the Grand Theft Auto community, helping sustain interest in the title for over a decade. Grand Theft Auto V was the most-watched game on Twitch in 2023, according to SullyGnome. Instead, Zelnick noted that Take-Two will protect their own IP — in 2022, the company asked MyMetaverse to remove its NFTs from GTAservers, saying it could not allow “sale of virtual currencies, generating revenue via corporate sponsorships or in-game integrations, or the use of cryptocurrencies or crypto assets.”
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Zelnick said, “We’re protective of our intellectual property, we’re protective, of course, of other people’s intellectual properties, but we do sense that that can be a positive addition to the industry. I don’t think that it will define our company or the industry, however.” Take-Two’s upcoming major releases include Grand Theft Auto VI and Civilization VII, both of which are scheduled to launch sometime next year.
