On January 22nd 1999 take-two interactive software announced
the creation of a new quote internal videogame label unquote by the name of Rockstar
Games over the years they gave us the Grand Theft Auto games Max Payne bully
manhunt Midnight Club the Red Dead games and they're huge they're bigger than
you can even imagine but just how big is that hi folks its Falcon and today on
game ranks we asked the question how big is Rockstar Games the press release
Rockstar Games put out in January of 1999 was not actually there found in was
their first public action over the course of the previous year they had put
together quite a few different developers that take-two had acquired to create
rock star games including DMA design now known as Rockstar North Limited
although their name officially changed after the release of Grand Theft Auto 3
and 2001however DMA design is the studio that heads up and created Grand Theft
Auto David Jones and Mike Daly are the actual people who came up with the
concept of Grand Theft Auto although later titles were mainly helmed by dan and
Sam Houser who also actually founded the overarching rockstar company now last year
Grand Theft Auto 5 was named the most profitable entertainment product of all
time and this was April last year it's only continued to make money since but
at that point it had sold 90 million copies and had racked in over 6 billion in
revenue from not only those copies sold but also the recurring consumer spending
anyway there's no reason to believe anything has changed since then last month
it was announced that it had
sold over a hundred and ten million copies it's
only continued to make money as other titles come and go and if we're talking
about other titles we have to talk about rock stars other titles including Red
Dead Redemption -which is another massive title that's made an obscene amount
of money selling24 million copies by May this year which makes it reasonable to
assume just off sales alone it's probably broken a billion dollars and
apparently Red Dead Redemption online is actually performing better than Grand Theft
Auto online did at this point in its life cycle so it's reasonable to assume
just breaking a billion would probably be a low conservative estimate for what
they've done which is wild because these are their two most recent games they
have a very long history of very successful games by 2014 the company had
announced that they'd sold250 million copies of all of their various games
which is a lot that's a quarter billion and that was five years ago now given
the fact that they have two online products that go along with their huge open
world stories that are equally if not more successful than the open world
stories and kind of provide the excuse to do the stories at this point they've
slowed down their development of new titles at this point but that's
understandable I get it we used to get Grand Theft Auto games or expansions
fairly often and even though like I said they may be put out less games than
they used to they certainly don't put out less content though according to take
two interactive CEO strauss selnick that will be changing soon he said I don't
think that the time between games will be expanding further in fact I would
expect in many instance sit may compress he did note that having two online
games that function a splat forms for new content has eased the pressure to
release new titles he did goon to acknowledge that eight years between games is
too long they're a thriving company that's constantly doing quite a bit at this
point and actually maintained over 2,000 employees worldwide there's basically
an absurd amount of money that changes hands and given Rockstar was both
founded and run by Sam and dan Houser they actually take a large amount of those
royalties last year rockstars royalties to talled in the area of 538million and
some estimate up to half of that goes to those two people which is kind of an
obscene amount of money now keep in mind that doesn't mean half ofthat
definitely goes to them it means upto half there are estimates that are much
lower but there's also a lawsuit from a previous royalty pool share by the name
of Leslie Benzies who used to do work on the series and had a stake in the company
that the lawsuit supposedly says that both of them and a couple of key insiders
get literally
half of the profits that Rockstar receives which that's a lot of
money now I don't know how reliable of a number that is on account his lawsuit
suffered a couple of setbacks regarding not just procedure but some
exaggeration as to the amount of money he was supposed to get out of it however
the court also did rule that there was credible evidence he does have some kind
of stake on those royalties so it should be regarded as I mean credible information
that they make that kind of money and we know that the royalties distributed to
rock star were definitely over half a billion last year so we are talking about
a huge business at this point back in 2014Sam and dan Houser actually entered
the list of the thousand richest people inthe UK and they've only continued to make
money since which is a you know running trend as far as this conversation goes
now as big as Rockstar Games is Rockstar Games is actually owned by take-two
interactive which came into being way back in 1993so however big Rockstar is
take to is technically bigger because they both own that and 2k games which is
another big company where take to Interactive gives over a half a billion
dollars to Rockstar Games as its royalties take-two interactive makes well over
two billion dollars a year now relatively speaking Electronic Arts brought in
over five billion dollars in 2018 and that makes Rockstar may be involved in
about one tenth of what EA is involved in now if we're talking about actual
like product sit's very clear that Rockstar does not ship anywhere near one
tenth the amount of products that EA does when we consider that Rockstar may be
releases a game you know every few years and is competing with them in that way
it's kind of wild at this point in 2019 EA has published six games rockstar published
no games this year not a single one now keep in mind Rockstar functions kind of
as a developer slash publisher slash sub publisher of take two and EA is a
publisher that has a large number of its own internal developers but you can
kind of get how different the business models are just by that to make one
tenth of what EA makes by not releasing anything like similarly last year they
only released Red Dead Redemption too I mean they didn't release any other
games they did make content for grand theft auto online but that's not really
the same thing is it EAS move in doing that same kind of thing anthem also kind
of failed miserably compare anthem to anything that rockstar has ever done in
terms of reception or sales and anthems not gonna look great especially in
terms of reception like reception it's not even a contest but when we consider
something that happened way back in 2008 which was a takeover bid that
Electronic Arts attempted to pull with take-two interactive which would have
put Rockstar under the EA umbrella was something ea attempted to do with two billion
dollars which as we now know take-two interactive makes more than that every
year they probably knew what they were trying to get at that point and EA would
have had one less pretty big competitor recently there's been a rumor that Sony
was going to attempt to buy take two now keeping in mind to take two is worth
way more now than back then just off the strength of rockstar games but let's
not forget they owned other things as well investors I think kind of
unintuitivelis kind of foolishly thought that would be a great thing because
when those rumors started circulating shares for take two actually
went way up
now this is kind of an utterly silly thing the reason why take two does so well
is the same reason that Rockstar Games itself does so well they put games out
on multiple platforms yes it would seem like a big boon to make Grand Theft
Auto six a PlayStation 5 exclusive but let's not forget why the kind of money
that rockstar games and therefore take-two interactive make happens it's because
you can get these games on any platform the software itself is the driver of
the sale not the platform and because of that whatever you have is where you
buy the game there big because they cast a very broad net and considering that
rockstar games as a single entity is very big however like I said if that type
of a deal went through it basically really kneecap the old business model that
they run unless people would play the game when you're considering that grand
theft auto online and Red Dead Redemption online are now very large parts of
rockstars business model that wouldn't be good in the case of that it would be
a bad investment for a platform holder to buy a game maker that depends on the situation
of multiplatform so heavily but understanding exactly how deep its roots lay in
literally every platform is key to understanding just how big rockstar games is
which even though itis not the biggest company in gaming fora basically single
entity it's unimaginably large I cannot imagine what I would do with the kind
of money the Houser brother has taken if it's even a tenth of what that lawsuit
says it is II genuinely can't it's not there in my head are you capable of
imagining spending that kind of money if you are do us a favor leave us a
comment.
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