Red Dead Redemption, Mafia II delayed; NHL 2K11 is Wii exclusive @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on March 04, 2010

News: And still no news about Grand Theft Auto V.

Take-Two Interactive held their quarterly financial briefing yesterday and touched on a few things they have planned for 2010 and beyond.

The most immediate news is that the company has announced that Red Dead Redemption will be delayed from its current April 27 release date. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game will now perform a standoff with store shelves on May 18, which is part of Take-Two's Summer quarter. Take-Two CEO Ben Feder more or less admitted the delay was due to moving Redemption out of the range of some of the Spring's other big hits: "We shifted the launch of the game by several weeks into the third quarter. We believe this is the optimal time frame to release what is being hailed as the next generation of sandbox games."

With Red Dead's move into the third quarter, Mafia II was delayed again. Previously scheduled for the Summer, the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 game will now be released sometime between August and October during Take-Two's Fall quarter. It will be joined by L.A. Noire (PS3, Xbox 360), Max Payne 3 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) and Sid Meier's Civilization V (PC). In delaying Mafia II, the company also warned that one of their major Fall releases could be further delayed into 2011, but didn't specify which one.

Moving on to something a bit surprising, Take-Two has announced that the next update to their NHL 2K series, NHL 2K11, will be released exclusively on the Wii. Company Chairman Struss Zelnick hinted that the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions were being skipped this year to create a true sequel next year. "As far as NHL, we're taking a year off on PS3 and Xbox 360 to refine, redesign and rethink," he said.

The last announcement came from Feder, who confirmed that more downloadable content for Borderlands is on the way. But he did not say how many DLC updates are in the works (the game has had three so far) or when they would be released.

Finally, Take-Two did some bragging as they revealed that they've shipped more than three million copies of BioShock 2 since its Feburary 9 release along with two million copies of NBA 2K10 (which was released in October). However, these two milestones were dwarfed by Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV, which has sold over 15 million copies since it was released in 2008.

We'll have more on all of Take-Two's 2010 releases soon.