During Take-Two Interactive’s fiscal Second Quarter 2025 report, the company announced the sale of Kerbal Space Program and Tales of the Shire developer Private Division to an undisclosed buyer for an unknown amount.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick explained the reason for the selloff in a statement to Variety,
“We recently made the strategic decision to sell our Private Division label so we could focus our resources on growing our core businesses for the long term. So as part of that transaction, the buyer purchased substantially all of Private Division’s existing and unreleased titles. However, Take Two continues to support ‘No Rest for the Wicked,’ which launched in April on early access. Importantly, we’re grateful to the contributions that the Private Division team made to Take Two, and we’re confident that they’ll continue to achieve success.”
Some of the titles the undisclosed buyer will gain ownership of includes the successful title Kerbal Space Program, its sequel Kerbal Space Program 2 which flopped, The Outer Worlds, and also Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game which is still in development. Tales of the Shire, a Hobbit life sim set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, was licensed from Middle-earth Enterprises to Wētā Workshop and Private Division.
With additional The Lord of the Rings movies on the horizon that includes The War of the Rohirrim and The Hunt for Gollum, it is a surprise to see any company divest itself of a Lord of the Rings property. Especially one still in development no matter whether or not the company behind it isn’t meeting expectations.
The reason for Take-Two divesting itself of Private Division, according to Zelnick, who explained,
“The titles, though big, were not big in the context of our core intellectual properties at 2K and Rockstar. And our job really is to focus on making the biggest and best hits in the marketplace. We’re not the long tail company. We are top-ten hit makers around here. That’s where we are on the console side, that’s where we are on the mobile side, and that is the core of any mature entertainment business – being a top ten player.”
Tales of the Shire is expected to release March 25, 2025 for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, XBOX Series X/S, Netflix Games, and Steam.
Whether or not the change in ownership will effect the game’s release date has yet to be revealed.
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[…] to Early 2025. But what is more interesting is that the game recently changed hands as publisher Take-Two Interactive sold the Tales of the Shire developer Private Division to an unknown buyer for an undisclosed amount. The fact that a Lord of the Rings video game was […]
[…] Rings-branded video games such as The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria and, more recently, the selling off of the developer working on The Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game which is still being developed. The […]