Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTWO) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Mario Lu: Got it. That makes sense. And then just on a separate note, in terms of the topic of charging a higher price for users to get access to a game like early access during the launch, I noticed it wasn’t included NBA 2K preorder pricing. Is this an opportunity in the future or is just something you guys opted out of? Thanks.

Karl Slatoff: Yeah. We have – most of – it’s funny you say a higher price because when we have some early access games in the market right now, we typically would offer them at a lower price because it would imply that there’s more to come in the game, and it’s not necessarily the final version. We have seen the early access models out there in terms of holding back access and making people pay more for earlier access – that’s not something that we’ve done to date. I would never say never. But honestly, that’s a marketing decision. And our priority is really making sure that the game comes out, comes out in a timely fashion as the best experience possible. That’s something that makes sense. So it’s down the line, we could experiment with it. But to date, that has not been something that we’ve looked at.

Mario Lu: Got it. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question is from David Karnovsky with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

David Karnovsky: Thank you. Just on the bookings by label, I wanted to follow up on the guidance for Zynga. I think that’s down slightly on the maintained bookings figure. So I wanted to see if you could walk through the adjustment there. And then sticking with mobile, you talked about hyper casual focus on releasing games that retain better, have a higher mix of IP spend. Just wanted to see if you could unpack the thinking behind the strategy there, what the traction has been and maybe how that impacts the ad revenue potentially from Rollic and Bapcor. Thanks.

Lainie Goldstein: So for the bookings for Zynga for mobile, there are some game shifts within the year. So there was some reforecasting of some of the existing games, and that’s what has changed within mobile.

Strauss Zelnick: And then in terms of the hyper casual business, what we’ve seen is that there are some gains, particularly with the acquisition of Bapcor that are a bit stickier than the typical hyper casual business. And they have the opportunity to engage consumers for longer periods of time and also potentially lead to not just necessarily monetizing through advertising, but also monetizing through in-out purchasing. So we’re starting to see that. We’re starting to experiment with that. And we think that there’s a market there for us. I think that people have been — we’ve been calling is the hybrid casual market where you have the ability to not only monetize with advertising, but also in out purchases just because the experiences are a bit deeper and they last a little bit longer.

So we think that’s very exciting. I don’t know that it’s going to necessarily impact the advertising opportunity overall, but it certainly creates new opportunities within that purchases for us.

David Karnovsky: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question is from Omar Dessouky with Bank of America. Please proceed.

Omar Dessouky: Hi. Thank you for taking question. So you didn’t change your full year guidance. And I wanted to know, I think David Karnovsky asked the question and you talked about Zynga a little bit. I wanted to know what — whether your implied like-for-like guidance on mobile has changed at all since the last time you guided. And then within that, do you expect advertising to grow on an organic basis, that is excluding Bapcor. And I have one more question.