Take-Two CEO claims Roll7 and Intercept Games have not shut down following layoffs
Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, has stated that reports of the closures of Private Division studios Roll7 and Intercept Games are inaccurate, but did not reveal the developers' current status.
The details:
Last month, it was revealed that Take-Two would be laying off 5% of its workforce, with significant cuts reported at publisher Private Division. Following the report, Bloomberg claimed that Olli Olli developer Roll7 and Kerbal Space Program studio Intercept Games had closed their doors as part of the restructuring, citing internal documents.
In a new interview with IGN, Zelnick claims this is not the case, but did not provide any further details regarding the studios. “We didn’t shutter those studios, to be clear,” Zelnick claimed. “And we are always looking at our release schedule across all of our studios to make sure that it makes sense. So we are being very judicious because we are in the middle of a cost reduction program that we’ve already concluded and are now fully rolling out. We’ve announced that we’re saving $165 million in existing and future costs, but we haven’t shuttered anything.”
When IGN asked if the CEO denied the studios' closure, a Take-Two PR representative responded, "What we've said is, in the 8-K filing that we put out, we talked about the cost reduction plan is approximately 5% reduction in headcount worldwide, but we did not give a label-by-label breakdown of what that looks like." When asked for further details about the rumored closures, the representative stated, "We have not provided any additional color beyond what I just said."
More gaming news:
Free-to-play shooter The Division Heartland has been canceled as Ubisoft looks to focus on "bigger opportunities" like Rainbow Six Siege and XDefiant.
Square Enix intends to lay off an unspecified number of employees over the next month, affecting employees in Europe and the US.
