Take-Two are selling Private Division and closing Roll7 and Intercept, because they're in "the business of making great big hits"

Take-Two Interactive have sold their publishing label Private Division to an unnamed party, along with five of Private Division's "live and unreleased titles". The GTA 6 publisher have also finally confirmed that they have shut down OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome devs Roll7 together with Kerbal Space Program 2 creators Intercept Games, months after performing mass layoffs at both studios.

"[W]e recently made the strategic decision to sell our Private Division label to focus our resources on growing our core and mobile businesses for the long-term," company president Karl Slatoff said in an investor call last night. "As part of this transaction, the buyer purchased our rights to substantially all of Private Division's live and unreleased titles." Take-Two are holding onto No Rest For The Wicked, the Soulsy early access ARPG from the makers of Ori And The Blind Forest.

"We are grateful for the contributions that the Private Division team has made to our company and are confident that they will continue to achieve success in their new home," Slatoff added.

There's a bit more on the reasoning here in this GamesIndustry.biz interview with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. The short version is that cool dystopian rollerskating games and sprawling engineer sandboxes do not make enough cash.

"We're really best at these big AAA experiences," he said. "We have the biggest intellectual properties in the interactive entertainment business, some of the biggest intellectual properties in the overall entertainment business and to make sequels to existing beloved franchises as well as to create new hit intellectual properties is our mission.

"The team of Private Division did a great job supporting independent developers and, almost to a one, every project they supported did well," Zelnick went on. "However, the scale of those projects was, candidly, on the smaller side, and we're in the business of making great big hits."

Take-Two have had "strong second quarter results" for their fiscal year 2025, something Zelnick largely attributes in this week's investor call to "the continued success of the Grand Theft Auto and Borderlands franchises" (Borderlands, you might recall, recently had a movie adaptation, which has "benefited" Borderlands game sales despite being a load of old rope). Zelnick anticipates "record" performance in 2026 and 2027, driven by the release of GTA 6, which Take-Two still have pegged for console launch in 2025 despite rumours it might slip to 2026.

Founded in 2017, Private Division was Take-Two's attempt to build an audience for more economical and adventurous "triple-I" games that combine the gloss of a GTA with relatively eccentric mechanics or stories. Take-Two aren't the only company to cut back on smaller experiments of late. Last month, Ubisoft confirmed that they had broken up the team responsible for the well-regarded Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown (there were no layoffs).

In the wake of stagnating growth brought on by over-ambitious expansion during the Covid lockdown years, the investor-facing mindset appears currently to be: if it's not Assassin's Creed or GTA-scale, what's the point?