Earlier this year, reports came out that Take-Two Interactive is looking to shut down or sell off its indie publishing label Private Division, as almost all employees were being laid off. While sharing its latest financial results, and after months of silence about Private Division, the GTA publisher has now confirmed the sale of the indie label.
The sale has included both Private Division as a company, as well as most games that still have publishing contracts with it. Interestingly, Take-Two has not disclosed who is the buyer. This announcement will arrive "relatively soon," according to Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
"We made this strategic decision so that we could focus all of our resources on growing our core and mobile businesses for the long term," Zelnick says in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz. "We"re really best at these big AAA experiences. 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."
Aside from the marketing jargon, the CEO also went on to say why exactly it decided to sell off Private Division:
"The team of Private Division did a great job supporting independent developers and, almost to a one, every project they supported did well. However, the scale of those projects was, candidly, on the smaller side, and we"re in the business of making great big hits."
The upcoming The Lords of the Rings unvierse-set game, Tales of the Shire, that has players being hobbits as part of a life sim experience, is one of the titles that seems to be being transferred to the new unnamed entity for publishing. However, the sale does not include the publishing contract with No Rest for the Wicked, the latest game by Moon Studios, the team behind the Ori games. Take-Two will support the early access game going forward.