A sign of things to come?

[Dave]

True to the company's revised forecast a fortnight ago, Take-Two Interactive has confirmed significant losses of $137.9 million (£85.2 million) for its fiscal year ended October 31st 2009, which represents a drop of $235 million (£145.2 million) over the company's net income from the previous year.

Take-Two posted net revenue for this year of $968.5 (£598.6 million), down from $1.54 billion (£950.4 million) the previous fiscal year (when GTA IV was released). It seems the publisher still hasn't managed to shed the curse of being unable to post a profit without being buoyed by the release of a triple-A GTA game.

Other than that, the highlights from the company's financial report included 2 million unit sales for Gearbox's Borderlands. "Borderlands from 2K Games has now sold over 2 million units worldwide and has established itself as a key franchise for Take-Two, for which the Company has long-term publishing rights," Take-Two stated.

Now, I am not one to buy into all of the recession crap. I mean sure, people are struggling to make ends meet but is it our fault? I doubt it. However, I do seem to take a lot of notice when it comes to things that are important to me. Do I care that oil barons are lining their pockets at the expense of the general public, not particularly. Do I care that one of my favourite games developers are being pushed out of business because of the recession? Of course I do. I know that may seem very stupid and cynical but I do not really care to be honest. I like to play games and I like to have all of the best releases available to me when I buy games. However, the recession is taking a hold of everything at the moment and the gaming world is certainly no exception to this.

As you can see, 2k games have posted a less that fruitful looking balance sheet that shows huge drops on what they projected to have made in this fiscal year. The have lost millions and it is because of the recession. 2k is one of my favourite studio groups and I thought that Borderlands and the sports series' that they put out every year could rival EA given some time and a little bit of effort. The NBA and NHL rivals are pretty good and I would state that I prefer them over the EA equivalents. With that being said, 2k seem to be struggling and I was wondering if this is a sign of things to come? Do you think that 2k deserve it for putting out lacklustre games or is it just the recession taking hold? Will more and more developers drop out of business because of this?