News GI.biz: Take-Two has reportedly laid off the vast majority of Private Division staff

[N75]

Private Division recently published Penny's Big Breakaway (Evening Star) and No Rest for The Wicked (Moon Studios, early access).

 

[N75]

I wonder what's going to happen with the unreleased projects like Project Bloom (Game Freak) and Bloober Team's untitled horror game. It seems like part of the deal with Private Division is that the developers own the IP, but there's still the issue of funding.

 

[franzen23]

I thought GameFreak made enough from Pokemon that they would be able to just publish games themselves.
But i guess they don't have much experience in that field besides their smaller releases so they just want someone else to take care of publishing duties

 

[Hailinel]

I didn't even realize Private Division was part of Take Two.

 

[N75]

I thought GameFreak made enough from Pokemon that they would be able to just publish games themselves.
But i guess they don't have much experience in that field besides their smaller releases so they just want someone else to take care of publishing duties

I think it just comes down to not having international publishing/distribution sources outside of Nintendo/TPC. They've published some of their non-Pokemon games digitally, but even then the physical versions are usually handled by an external company.

 

[9-Volt]

Gearbox is already an indie publisher so they probably eliminated all the similar roles. Still sucks, they could have transferred them somewhere else in the company instead.

 

[OctoSplattack]

This week I'm learning that a lot of studios are part of Take Two. This industry is more consolidated than I realized.

 

[sagadego20]

Penny's Big Breakaway was published by them

 

[Evilnemesis8]

I had a feeling that there would be layoffs there after the Roll7 and Intercept Games news.

Here's the list of games published by Private Division in some capacity.
There were some great pickups early on with Outer Worlds and Kerbal(the first one).
There's Hades here as well, but as far as I can tell, it is for the physical versions for PlayStation and Xbox.
Considering those versions came after the PC and the Switch versions, it's probably not that much revenue.

Looking at most other titles, it does seem like it is quite a few were not so great sellers and depending on the actual budgets, there's a strong likelihood that quite a few of them were straight up commercial failures.


Really unfortunate news, a familiar refrain were are getting real familiar with in recent times...