Stop us if you've heard this one before — Grand Theft Auto 5 and its multiplayer component GTA Online have made a killing for Take-Two Interactive this past fiscal quarter, and the numbers have only increased since the last time around.
In an interview discussing the latest earnings report of Rockstar Games' parent company Take-Two, Strauss Zelnick opened up about how they didn't expect GTA Online to lead the charts for so long, and by such large a margin.
No doubt the massive success of the game is no longer a surprise to anyone who has been following its performance over the years, but compared to what we might have predicted back before launch, it is an astounding feat to have the game close its most successful quarter almost four years after having been released.
We've often discussed how radically GTA 5 subverted all conventions of video game shelf life, sales curves, and player-base dynamics. However, the fact that it keeps pulling this consistently so many times is insane. Four years after release your typical AAA title would be long beyond 'winding down', and has most likely already faded into obscurity.
Let's look at a few games released the same year as GTA 5: Bioshock Infinite, Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, the Tomb Raider reboot and the Last of Us come to mind as some of the biggest releases, but who speaks of them anymore? Do they make headlines? Do they still get content support and millions of players every week?
Looking at Assassin's Creed more closely — since Black Flag, which launched almost concurrently with GTA 5, Rogue, Unity and Syndicate were all released and the franchise also went on a 2-year hiatus. But GTA 5 is still here and breaking records.
Of course, the driving force behind this success is the multiplayer portion, GTA Online. However fans who know a bit about the game's development history will know that Online was planned almost as an afterthought to the main game, and was more of an experiment than an actual attempt to tear down everything we thing we know about AAA life cycles. Rockstar outright expected it to be fairly unpopular.
When we first launched GTA Online, we didn't know how the title would be received. And we didn't know how virtual currency sales would pencil out. One of the reasons we haven't released a lot of metrics around that is because we've been learning as we go along. What I'm proud of is our approach at this company genuinely is first and foremost to entertain and delight our consumers, and only well after that point to think about how we monetize that engagement. As it turns out, monetization has gone very well indeed
Zelnick provides us with a bit of an understatement there — a year ago, Take-Two revealed that they had earned over $500 million through microtransactions alone, and since then the player base and Shark Card sales figures have only gone up. We'd hazard a guess and say that's been more than doubled since.
Sources from within Rockstar North have indicated in the past that the Houser brothers were uninterested in paying any attention to GTA Online beyond monetization, and the development team fully expected it to be enjoyed only by a niche among the players, and not for long.







