Games publisher Take-Two Interactive made $22m from its stake in video livestreaming service Twitch, when the company was bought by Amazon for $970m this year.
The publisher revealed the windfall while announcing its latest quarterly results, while also hailing the impact of Grand Theft Auto Online, the online mode for its Grand Theft Auto V console game.
The latter was released in September 2013, so year-on-year, Take-Two’s revenues for the third quarter of the year unsurprisingly plunged: from $1.27bn in Q3 2013 to $135.4m in Q3 2014.
Take-Two also swung from a net profit of $325.6m in GTA V’s launch quarter to a net loss of $34.4m a year later, based on the non-GAAP figures (generally accepted accounting principles) declared in its quarterly financials.
Digital sales of games and in-game content accounted for $89.8m of Take-Two’s revenues in the third quarter of 2014, with 58% of that coming from “recurrent consumer spending” on virtual currencies, downloadable content and online games.
“We continue to see strong consumer engagement with Grand Theft Auto Online, which has both exceeded our expectations and has been the single largest contributor to digitally-delivered revenue in every quarter since its launch,” Take-Two’s chairman and chief executive Strauss H. Zelnick told analysts in the company’s earnings call.
The last quarter included two new updates for GTA Online: The San Andreas Flight School and The Last Team Standing, which Zelnick said had fuelled its success, as Take-Two and developer Rockstar Games prepares for the upcoming launches of GTA V on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
“The ongoing release of new content for Grand Theft Auto Online keeps consumers immersed in the game’s vast open world, and we remain optimistic about its future,” he said.
Take-Two also had some mobile games success in its last quarter, with 3.5m downloads of the WWE Supercard mobile game, which according to Zelnick “has quickly become 2K’s most financially successful free-to-play mobile offering”.
The company did not break out its mobile revenues from other platforms, though: 74% of its income in the third quarter came from console, while 26% came from “PC and other” platforms.
