(BFM Bourse) – Take Two shares fell sharply in pre-opening trading on Wall Street after the group unveiled the trailer for GTA 6 and announced a release date for 2025 on home consoles. The market seems disappointed or at least taking its profits, while Take Two was well on its way in recent weeks in anticipation of these announcements.
Fans (and investors) have been eagerly waiting to learn more about GTA 6a new opus in the successful Grand Theft Auto video game saga, which more or less allows you to play one or more gangsters in a big city each time.
So much so that Take Two, the publisher and owner of the game’s creator, the Rockstar Games studio, had to rush to publish the game’s trailer on Monday evening between midnight and one a.m. (French time). in fact leaked a few minutes earlier on social networks, while the “trailer” was officially to be unveiled this Tuesday at 3 p.m., notes Deutsche Bank. This trailer generated more than 62.5 million views on YouTube in the space of 13 hours.
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A release date that may be disappointing
GTA 6which will therefore be released more than 10 years later GTA 5 (2013), will a priori offer the player the chance to embody two characters, including, for the first time, a woman (for a series dating from 1997 this is not too early). The action will also return to Vice City, scene of the episode GTA Vice City (2002) and a sort of video game version of Miami. The trailer also has a slightly “eighties” connotation with its hard FM music (“Love is a long road” by Tom Petty) and its pastel colors. Not much more except that social networks, alligators and a certain vulgarity seem to be on the menu for these future adventures.
But the real information to remember remains the release date, namely the year 2025, without any other details. In a press release published following this trailer, Take Two specifies that this horizon concerns the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S home consoles, without mentioning the PC version.
On Wall Street, the market is seizing up somewhat. Take Two shares dropped almost 3% in pre-opening trading around 2:20 p.m., after having even lost more than 6% a few hours ago.
As Bloomberg points out, Take Two shares had risen significantly ahead of these announcements, with the title even gaining 7.5% in early November following information indicating the upcoming release of the trailer.
Profit taking can thus take place on the stock which has gained more than 50% since the start of the year, and 15.5% over one month. Furthermore, the relatively distant and vague horizon for the game’s release may have disappointed investors who were hoping for a release next year.
“It may also be that investors are concerned that the revelation was blurred by the leak, or that players did not like what they saw,” simply notes Barron’s, the magazine owned by the group from the Wall Street Journal.
It is also worth remembering the importance of GTA for Take Two. The sometimes controversial license (the first opus provoked the ire of the London police in the 1990s) represents cumulative sales of more than 410 million units, including 190 million for the last episode, GTA 5.
Julien Marion – ©2023 BFM Bourse