'GTA 6' publisher lays off 5 percent of workforce, cancels games

Grand Theft Auto IV publisher Take-Two Interactive has revealed plans to lay off five percent of its workforce by the end of the year, as well as cancel several projects currently in development. The games industry layoffs keep coming, and they don't stop coming. 

The decisions were revealed on Tuesday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing which briefly outlined Take-Two's "cost reduction program." The company expects its plan to save it $165 million per annum and "enhance the Company’s margin profile."

Take-Two had 11,580 employees as of March last year, meaning the layoffs are likely to impact around 600 people. However, it isn't yet clear exactly where these cuts will come from. The holding company owns several well-known game developers and publishers, including Bioshock publisher 2K, Kerbal Space Program publisher Private Division, and GTA 6 publisher Rockstar Games. Its $460 million acquisition of Borderlands developer Gearbox was further announced just three weeks ago.

Several video games currently in development will also be cancelled as part of Take-Two's cost-cutting measures, though it hasn't been revealed exactly which ones. GTA 6 is probably safe though, with the highly anticipated game expected to smash sales records when released next year. Over 190 million copies of its predecessor GTA 5 have been sold since its launch in 2013.

Layoffs are awful even at the best of times, but Take-Two's news particularly stings considering that in February CEO Strauss Zelnick explicitly stated that the company was not planning any job cuts. Though the company had revealed it was working on a cost reduction program, Zelnick had emphasised that Take-Two was focusing on areas other than staffing, such as software and vendor expenses.

"I would just note that our biggest line item of expense is actually marketing," Zelnick told IGN at the time. "The hardest thing to do is to lay off colleagues, and we have no current plans."

Even so, this wouldn't be the first time Take-Two played down speculation about layoffs right before cutting its workforce. After Take-Two announced a previous cost-cutting program last February, Zelnick told GamesIndustry.biz the company didn't "expect any kind of broad-based reduction in force," and that it would "continue to support and build our development teams."

Take-Two subsequently conducted layoffs the very next month. Though to be fair, the development teams were largely unscathed. Instead, the cuts primarily impacted "corporate operations and label publishing."

The video games industry was plagued by layoffs and studio closures throughout 2023, yet somehow 2024 is managing to look even worse. Earlier this year Electronic Arts also announced it would cut five percent of its workforce, just one day afterPlayStation revealed it was letting go of approximately 900 employees. Over 8,000 games industry layoffs were announced in the first two months of 2024 alone, already exceeding estimates on the total number cut the year before.