Take-Two’s mobile net bookings fell 13% year-on-year to $707.6m in Q2 as Zynga’s Color Block Jam couldn’t match its record performance a year ago.
According to the publisher’s Q2 FY27 results and the earnings call that followed, mobile made up 45% of net bookings, up from 42% a year earlier, though that’s largely because total net bookings dropped 18% to $1.6bn, with NBA 2K27 coming in below forecast. Mobile net revenue fell 11% to $731.1m, or 49% of the total.
“Mobile performed in line with our expectations,” said CEO Strauss Zelnick on the earnings call. Net bookings for Color Block Jam “decreased double digits compared to its peak performance during last year’s second quarter”.
Toon Blast grew 4% thanks to Beam, a new feature that helps players solve puzzles. Words With Friends grew 6% after a collaboration with Wheel of Fortune that included a themed week on the TV show and in-game puzzles.
NBA 2K All-Star, which 2K runs with Tencent in China, has passed 11m registered users since launching last year and is “yielding strong profit margins”, Zelnick said. NBA 2K Mobile Season 9 launched on October 20, and NBA 2K27 Arcade Edition debuted last week. WWE SuperCard also got its 13th season last week, and has now been downloaded nearly 40m times since launch.
Take-Two expects mobile to decline again in Q3 and across the full year, which CFO Lainie Goldstein put down to “last year’s success of Color Block Jam and our assumption that trends will moderate for several of Zynga’s mature mobile titles.”
Even so, Zynga is still expected to account for 34% of Take-Two’s net bookings this fiscal year, behind Rockstar Games on 37% and ahead of 2K on 29%. Six of the ten titles Take-Two expects to be its biggest contributors to net bookings in Q3 are Zynga mobile games: Toon Blast, Match Factory, Empires & Puzzles, Words With Friends, Color Block Jam and Toy Blast.
Zelnick said several of Zynga’s new titles look promising in soft launch, including Top Goal, which, like CSR 3, is in soft launch but has yet to get a firm release date. Goldstein said user acquisition costs came in lower than forecast, partly due to timing, which “is mostly due to some of the movement and some of the new releases for our mobile titles.”
Zelnick wouldn’t say how much of Take-Two’s mobile bookings now come through direct-to-consumer. “We still have third-party partners. We value them greatly. We don’t expect to transition away from them,” he said. “It is significant, and it is growing, and it obviously has a very meaningful margin and bottom line impact.”
Advertising revenue fell 9% year-on-year to $121m, though Zelnick said the ad business “improved sequentially”. “Historically, advertising in mobile has been endemic. It’s been advertising in mobile games for mobile games,” he said. “If we’re able to expand our business meaningfully into brand advertising, and we already have started, then that should be a terrific opportunity for us.”
“Historically, mobile video games monetised under 20% of the audience, typically 10% of the audience, through in-app purchases,” he added. “What doesn’t make a whole lot of sense is serving consumers for free at a cost to us. I think there’s a huge opportunity for us in the ad business.”
Mobile accounted for 52% of Take-Two’s net bookings in Q4 FY26, and 49% across the full year. In the first half of FY27, mobile accounted for 49% of net bookings, up from 47% in the same period last year.
