While Hollywood is in crisis, the gaming market is in a gold rush: This is how game studios make billions from GTA and Co.

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Games keep customers interested. Netflix noticed this too. The US broadcasting giant has been offering mobile games to its subscribers for two years, in addition to movies and television series.

On December 14, three heavyweights will join us: three newly revamped classic games “GTA 3”, “GTA Vice City” and “GTA San Andreas”. Just in time for the excitement surrounding the sixth installment of the “Grand Theft Auto” series to come, nearly two decades after the games were first released.

Giant of the entertainment industry

The gaming market is doing great. The sheer size of the entertainment industry now generates nearly three times more revenue than the film and music industries combined. In 2022, this figure was 351 billion dollars. Almost three-quarters of that came from mobile games.

Hollywood is currently grappling with oversaturation in the streaming business, a pandemic that has caused many productions’ budgets to explode, and two strikes. In addition, the major studios have all failed with blockbusters this year: Of the films costing over $200 million in 2023, only one, Marvel’s sequel “Guardians of the Galaxy 3,” even turned a profit.

Meanwhile, technology companies in the gaming industry are making successful investments several times this amount. Giant Microsoft is in the final stages of the largest technology acquisition in history. The company is purchasing game developer Activision Blizzard for approximately $69 billion.

GTA 6 is the most expensive game of all time

The US game company Take Two Interactive, which is also owned by GTA developer Rockstar Games, is a very small fish among the big players, with sales of $5.4 billion this year. Still, the studio is investing heavily in its hobby horse, “Grand Theft Auto.” Estimates are that the cost of developing episode six is ​​between one and two billion US dollars. It would become the most expensive game of all time.

The fifth installment has already paid off for Take Two and Rockstar: to date, it has become the second best-selling game of all time. So far, only Microsoft subsidiary Mojang’s “Minecraft” has sold more copies. Rockstar has also created an excellent money-minting machine out of “GTA 5’s” online multiplayer. Thanks to the sale of virtual currencies and GTA+ subscriptions, “GTA Online” brought in half a billion US dollars to the coffers last year alone — a decade after its launch, mind you.

Another cash cow is on the way

There was also a fear that, due to astronomical development costs, players would have to dig into their pockets a little more than usual for the new GTA part. According to Take-Two CEO Harry Strauss Zelnick (66), in the future, the sales prices of games will be determined according to possible playing hours. “By these standards, our prices are still very low because we offer long hours of employment,” Strauss Zelnick said when presenting quarterly figures in early November.

Insiders contradict price increase rumors. Still, Rockstar and Take Two won’t miss the opportunity to make GTA 6 its new cash cow. Take Two had already announced in its last annual report that a “new phase of growth” would begin in April 2024. The company is looking to generate over eight billion US dollars in revenue over the next twelve months with GTA 6 and other “groundbreaking games”. Compared to today, sales have increased by almost 50 percent.

Source :Blick