Rumor: Viacom to buy Take-Two Interactive?

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s that time again where we have to scale the ever growing rumor mill on Take-Two Interactive.

This time, there’s information going around the Viacom will be buying Take-Two Interactive. Check out the details of the rumor via the “read more” link below.

For everyone’s benefit, we won’t be beating around the bush with this particular rumor. Apparently, there’s a speculation circulating that Viacom will be acquiring Take-Two Interactive.

As of last year, a group of shareholders that include OppenheimerFunds, SAC Capital management, and Tudor Investment fired the company’s management and retained ZelnickMedia to manage it.

Also, the company has been experiencing several delays regarding high-caliber titles Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360, PS3) and Manhunt 2 (Wii, PSP, PS2).

Viacom, on the other hand, has been actively buying gaming assets over the past couple of years and struck a deal with Microsoft that involved a gaming component.

It’s just not natural for a media conglomerate such as Viacom to buy whatever gaming publisher it sees fit because the acquired gaming firm could lose revenue from licensed games that are based on properties from rival media companies.

Most of these licensing deals have rules that allow the property owner to take the license somewhere else if the published gets sold to a competitor. As for Take-Two Interactive, they don’t have that kind of situation since most of their games are developed internally.

It’s one of the reasons why their operating expenses have always been higher than the industry’s average. Putting everything together, it seems that both Take-Two Interactive and Viacom won’t be having any problems whenever this does push through in the future.

Just a fair warning to those who like to let their minds wonder off when thinking about rumors, nothing is still set in stone. Don’t forget that these industry rumors should be taken with a good dose of skepticism.