Take-Two Announces Sale of Private Division, Plans To Focus on 'Big Hits'

Leading video games publisher Take-Two Interactive announced that it has sold its indie games label Private Division in order to focus on "big hits."

The latter has been responsible for publishing various popular titles such as The Outer Worlds and OlliOlli World. The news of the sale comes after the spread of rumors over the summer that Take-Two Interactive laid off the majority of the indie games label's employees.

Take-Two Interactive Sells Private Division

Despite the news, Take-Two Interactive did not reveal the identity of the buyer of Private Division. It also did not reveal how much the deal cost. A company spokesperson, Alan Lewis, said that the strategic decision was made to focus the company's resources to grow its core and mobile businesses for the long term.

He added that as part of the recent transaction, the anonymous buyer purchased Take-Two Interactive's rights to substantially all of Private Division's live and unreleased titles. The former will continue to provide support for No Rest for the Wicked which launched in April in early access, according to The Verge.

The news comes after reports noted that Private Division was plagued by "a string of flops," including the release of Kerbal Space Program 2. The game was supposedly filled with various bugs and was negatively criticized by fans.

The indie games label's titles include the upcoming The Lord of the Rings, Tales of the Shire, and an untitled Game Freak game known as Project Bloom. All of these titles will be having their rights transferred over to the new buyer.

Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick reassured fans that Grand Theft Auto (GTA) VI will not coincide with the launch of Borderlands 4. This comes as the company has gone another earnings cycle without providing a more specific release window for the latest entry in the GTA series, Variety said.

Focusing on Big Hits

Borderlands 4 is planned to come out sometime between Apr. 1, 2025, and Mar. 31, 2026. Zelnick added that it was safe to say that they would not stack up such massive releases without good reason.

Zelnick also said that the team at Private Division did their jobs wonderfully as independent developers. He added that all of the projects that they worked on did very well in terms of sales and popularity.

However, he noted that these games were simply on the smaller side of the scale, arguing that they were in the business of "making great big hits" for the video game industry, according to Games Industry.