Crew members of the original staff of Annapurna Interactive will be taking on new responsibilities in the form of a new company. As a result, the new company will essentially absorb Take-Two Interactive’s independent publishing label, Private Division.
This takeover of Private Division comes a couple of months after Take-Two Interactive had announced selling the label to a buyer that was, at the time, undisclosed. According to a report by Bloomberg, the buyer of Private Division is an Austin, Texas-based equity firm named Haveli Investments.
Since then, the report indicates that Haveli has tasked former staff members from Annapurna Interactive with running Private Division. This includes unreleased game from Private Division, like Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game. Other games that will be taken on by this new company include Kerbal Space Program and its sequel, and an unannounced title from the studio behind the Pokémon games, Game Freak.
Haveli Investments itself has not yet made any announcements or statements about the new company, which will essentially include a mix of employees from Private Division and former workers from Annapurna Interactive.
Back when Take-Two had originally sold Private Division, CEO Strauss Zelnick referred to the move as a strategic decision that would allow the company to focus its resources on its main upcoming projects, and said that its strengths lied more in the AAA space than the indie market.
“We made this strategic decision so that we could focus all of our resources on growing our core and mobile businesses for the long term,” said Zelnick in November. “We’re really best at these big AAA experiences. We have the biggest intellectual properties in the interactive entertainment business and some of the biggest intellectual properties in the overall entertainment business, and to make sequels to existing beloved franchises, as well as create new hit intellectual properties, is our mission.”
Quite a few games had been released under the Private Division label since it was originally created back in 2017. This includes games from a variety of markets, from indie titles like OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome, to more ambitious games like Kerbal Space Program 2 and The Outer Worlds.
Annapurna Interactive, on the other hand, had quite a tumultuous year, with most of its staff having resigned from their jobs back in September in the wake of a power struggle between its leadership. The company still currently exists, but hasn’t announced any new titles. The company is reportedly still developing Silent Hill: Townfall, which doesn’t yet have a release date.
