GTA parent company Take-Two Interactive has sold its indie game publishing label Private Division to an unknown buyer. The news comes a few months after Take-Two shut down Roll7 and Intercept, and Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says it’s part of the company’s shift toward mobile and blockbuster games.
“The team of Private Division did a great job supporting independent developers and, almost to a one, every project they supported did well,” Zelnick told GamesIndustry.biz. “However, the scale of those projects was, candidly, on the smaller side, and we’re in the business of making great big hits.”
“We made this strategic decision so that we could focus all of our resources on growing our core and mobile businesses for the long term,” Zelnick continued. “We’re really best at these big AAA experiences. We have the biggest intellectual properties in the interactive entertainment business, some of the biggest intellectual properties in the overall entertainment business and to make sequels to existing beloved franchises as well as to create new hit intellectual properties is our mission.”
The games acquisition frenzy from the heady days when Microsoft announced its intention to buy Activision Blizzard – a frenzy that resulted in studio closures and thousands of layoffs – has faded. With the likes of Embracer no longer snapping up studios, and with Zelnick giving no indication who the buyer was, it’s impossible to make an informed guess at who might own Private Division now.
Zelnick did say that Take-Two will continue supporting Moon Studio’s recent action-RPG, No Rest for the Wicked, for the foreseeable future.
