Digital distribution continues to gain importance, and some would argue that brick-and-mortar retailers will find themselves in trouble in the future. Take-Two has already benefited from the digital wave with episodic content for GTA IV. More is launching on Xbox Live this holiday (Ballad of Gay Tony), but that doesn't mean Take-Two wants to give up on retail.
Speaking on the conference call following the publisher's Q3 results, CEO Ben Feder talked about the balance between digital and retail. "...I think one of the lessons that not just in this download but some other download experiences, it’s clear that retail is the channel for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, there is a download component to a lot of our games and there will continue to be a download component," he said.
"The games live online and they live at retail, they live at both and whether that is download first, retail second/retail first, download second or some combination of the two, that’s an area that we are going to experiment with because we are innovating in that area, and it’s likely to change from title to title, but everything is going to have a download component, needs to have a download component to it and this is kind of one of the key lessons and we’ll see how -- see how GTA in the retail SKU performs," he added, referring to Episodes from Liberty City. "We are actually pretty optimistic about it and we think it’s terrific value, I mean, for $40, two great GTA games, new content available in retail is an unbelievable value. And so the downloads help to seed that market and we think will be critically important."
[Thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript]
