Earlier this week, Take-Two Interactive‘s CEO Strauss Zelnick took on questions regarding GTA VI and beyond. The interview was conducted by Variety’s Jenny Maas at a new gaming event called “iicon” located in Las Vegas.
One of the things the reporter asked Take-Two’s CEO is why Rockstar and Take-Two have been against adding real world brands and ads into Grand Theft Auto. It would be extremely lucrative. It is for small games and the biggest entertainment launch that will be GTA 6 would no doubt require expensive ads. Rockstar and Take-Two are not interested though. Zelnick’s response can be found below:
“We need to be true to the underlying intellectual property and we need to be true to our consumers. It’s a fictional world and everything in it is fictional. So we’re not even at risk of doing brand partnerships because all the brands are made up. And I think that keeps us pure.”
As we all know, GTA is a satirical take on real life. All of the brands in the game are parodies of real life companies. That’s one of the reasons that makes it special. Some people want real car companies etc so they turned to mods and FiveM servers that did that.
Now Rockstar owns FiveM, they have cracked down on server owners letting this happen. Once you remove the satirical parts of GTA from the game, it is no longer the Grand Theft Auto we know and love.
This is something RockstarINTEL readers would know already. Back in March, Zelnick actually criticised adverts within video games like GTA. He that he finds it “Very difficult for me to believe that we would want to have interstitial advertising in a game that someone paid 70 or 80 bucks for would seem unfair.”
Whilst Take-Two’s NBA 2K that does have ads in the game’s basketball arenas, that is a realistic placement for them in a video game world where it is meant to be like real life. Additionally, Zelnick stated these ads are just a small contributor to their overall revenue.
There’s also some other GTA 6 and Take-Two news from the same talk given out by Zelnick. He doubled down on the “astonishing” marketing cycle beginning “soon” and addressed pricing concerns after much talk on a $100 cost for the game. Additionally, the CEO even hinted at a future for another one of Rockstar’s franchises.
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