Is Rockstar doing microtransactions right?

70 per cent of GTA V owners have played online, with in-app purchases accounting for half of Take-Two’s total digital sales.

Rockstar owners Take-Two didn’t announce the figures as such, but CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed to MCV the 70 per cent figure, and said that ‘recurrent consumer spending related to GTA Online represented nearly half of our digitally delivered revenue in the quarter’.

As worked out by forum NeoGAF, if you plug that percentage into Take-Two’s recent financial results, where digital content sales rose 42% to $132.8 million, you get a figure of around $66 million – which is almost £40 million.

And that figure is despite recent problems with fake virtual money, and the fact that GTA Online is not particularly forward in asking you to pay real money to buy things.




Rockstar has been continually adding to GTA Online with minor updates, such as the recent Valentine’s Day Massacre Special, but so far most of it has been free. Although they have hinted at a larger story-based expansion in the future, that will probably be paid-for.

The rest of the MCV interview was an insistence by Zelnick that there doesn’t need to be a new Grand Theft Auto game every year, unlike most other big franchises.

Instead he claimed it was important that they didn’t oversaturate the market, saying ‘It is great that consumers anticipate our titles, like they anticipate the next James Bond film. Our goal is to create permanent franchises’.

Thoughts? Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk or leave a comment below