Seems like every year prior to the holiday season we get some news about big mergers. This week, Take-Two Interactive, a well-known publisher of 2K Games, 2K Sports, and Rockstar Games, shared their plans to expand their company portfolio and buy Codemasters, a company that made DiRT, GRID, and F1 racing games. From what we gather the new deal will be priced around 994 million dollars and is expected to be confirmed in the first quarter of 2021.
In an official statement, the CEO of Take-TWO Strauss Zelnick said that this new deal will highly compliment Take-Two’s sports portfolio which currently consists of NBA 2K series, NHL 2k, PGA Tour 2K, and WWE 2K. Adding a bunch of racing games to this list will surely open up some new horizons for Take-Two and possibly allow them to create even more new IPS.
It’s also worth mentioning that Codemasters have been real busy in recent years. They bought Evolution Studios (known for MotorStorm and DriveClub), Slightly Mad Studios (known for Project Cars). It also recently released a new DiRT game – DiRT 5 – which is currently available on OC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One with a next-generation consoles launch coming up shortly.
It will be interesting to see how our beloved racing franchises will change in the future. Having more resources might mean great future games, but as our experience tells us this is not always the case. However, we hope for the best.
