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'Grand Theft Auto V' Crosses $1B In Sales
- foobarqux 13y agoWhat is so great about this game? Most of it looks like terrible cut-scene-choose-your-own-adventure.
- nether 13y agoUnfortunately most single player games have devolved into this. It's hard and risky to develop novel gameplay rather than just building an interactive movie around tried-and-true game mechanics (run & gun). Most gamers are ok with this, just like most moviegoers are ok with franchise films (sequels/reboots/remakes). Media are just converging toward low-risk, formulaic, and consistently profitable goods. It happens at a speed inversely proportional with the complexity of the medium: music has been manufactured for a while, more recently movies, now games. Novels have proven trickier thus far. Readers seem to appreciate originality more and are more discerning, with a lot of surprise hits (and failures). It's only a matter of time before that formula is cracked though.
- boomlinde 13y agoIf you had a more fair look at things, I think you'd find that the rich diversity and sheer amount of music, film and written word available to you today is greater than at any point in history. I can only assume that you either just don't know very much about music or you are mixing up "media" with "the top players in the media industry"
- superdude 13y agoYou couldn't be more wrong. The GTA titles are great sandbox games.
- ebtalley 13y agoI think you hit the nail on the head. Being able to choose your own adventure has been captivating even without the visuals. Zork was captivating using ASCII, this even more so.
- staunch 13y agoIf this keeps going they're going to end up as profitable as Minecraft!
- ChuckMcM 13y agoHeh, except the cost to develop is much lower. So they will probably never achieve the same level of profitability, even if they achieve better revenue.
- pisarzp 13y agoIt doesn't really matter if margins are lower as long they have positive return (NPV) on every additional dollar spend
- jaredsohn 13y agoI think it depends on what you mean by "level of profitability". In absolute terms (i.e. how many coins could you put in a money bin), it should be achievable; but as a percentage (i.e. how you would measure it as an investor) it likely won't get there simply because the expenses for creating Minecraft were relatively low.
- Impossible 13y agoGTA V is already more profitable than Minecraft, even though Minecraft has sold more units across all platforms (http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/03/minecraft-pc-sales-at-12-million-franchise-at-33-million http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/03/minecraft-pc-sales-at...). 33 Million units at ~$20 is $660 million in revenue. This isn't including development costs, which are low for Minecraft but not zero (I'm guessing $5-$10 million over its lifetime.) Subtracting GTAV's combined development and marketing budget of $265 million still puts it ahead of Minecraft at $735 million, and it still has a lot more runway left.
- kansface 13y agoBut Take 2 has to share that revenue with retailers. Minecraft has direct sales, no?
- tedivm 13y agoThis article reads like an advertisement. You'd think Forbes would spend a little bit more time polishing up those press releases into something that they could at least pretend was journalism.
- citricsquid 13y agoThis is not a Forbes article. Forbes have a blogging platform that anyone can apply to publish on, this article was written by an unpaid contributor. Note "contributor" next to the author name.
- tedivm 13y agoThe only difference between a staff post and a contributor is that one line by their name. If Forbes didn't want me to associate their name with the content they would have distinguished it better.
- derefr 13y agoSame problem with TED's TEDx conferences. Why do so many brands want to throw away their cachet by stamping their name on random contributors' content?
- tesseractive 13y agoBecause some distributed content generation platforms like YouTube, the Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, and others have proved to be enormously successful and popular, so other content companies have tried to emulate that success?
- gph 13y agoI'd be fascinated to see what they spent 260 million dollars on producing this. I'm sure their graphics engine is pretty amazing, but it's not like they revolutionized anything that I'm aware of. Where did that money go?
- ErrantX 13y agoOkay, so a LOT went into marketing. But there is a significant development budget too... I was astounded as well, until I played it. The graphics are, as you say, very good. But what the money has clearly gone into is the production value. Cut scenes, animation, map, all of it is very high quality. That's pretty revolutionary attention to detail - especially over such a large map.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoThe development costs went mostly to content. (Like most games, GTA5 is not unique in this.) There was also a lot of advertising.
- ender7 13y agoAdvertising is not usually included in development costs; the total expense was probably higher.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoWell, in this case, it's been published that the 250 million included the advertising, as you can read from several other comments in this thread.
- stinky613 13y agoI was under the impression that a third of that figure was spent on marketing
- ape4 13y agoWe all know software is something that doesn't necessary get better the more people you throw at it.
- pgisgay 13y agoAnd that's distributed between 3500 developers last time I heard that worked on GTAv ?
- hyperion2010 13y agoSo the comparisons to other industries are misleading in one sense and deeply revealing in another. Movies spread out their sales over an extremely long time compared to games. This means that box office numbers will be smaller. This ALSO means that they are not serving many markets that could bring them revenue off the bat. Games that don't release on all platforms simultaneously have a similar problem, but nowhere near that of movies which refuse to let people watch them in their preferred format from the start.
- jmharvey 13y ago> Movies spread out their sales over an extremely long time compared to games. Is that true? It seems like most hundred-million-dollar movies make most of their money on opening weekend, and after a couple of weeks their (domestic) box office is basically finished. I'd expect GTA V to keep selling for a while. The Wikipedia page for GTA IV says it sold approximately 6 million copies in the first week, and 25 million copies total.
- ajross 13y agoWe just bought a copy of The Lion King for the kids. Needless to say, they don't get a whole lot of 1994-era games.
- dylandrop 13y agoWell, check out any of the Nintendo/Playstation/Xbox online stores. They all contain games from the 90s that you can buy for $5-10 a pop. Furthermore, I would think (I don't have any sources so this is just a guess) that with DVD sales plummeting, and the comparative ease of pirating movies as opposed to console games, that DVD sales would account for very little in the long run. However, I still see old video games at Black Friday events that sell out like crazy.
- teamonkey 13y agoJust because ports and refreshes of games exist, it doesn't mean they sell in meaningful numbers.
- jahewson 13y agoThese sorts of comparisons are pretty meaningless without inflation adjusted numbers.
- jahewson 13y agoThese sorts of comparisons are pretty meaningless without inflation adjusted numbers. That's why films break box office records year, after year, after year.
- yarou 13y agoPerhaps more so when your central bank keeps printing money
- madsushi 13y agoWell, games have been around for a far shorter time period than movies, so you're not comparing games from 1920 to games from today (and thus the overall effect of inflation is lower). Also, since the former #1 game (BLOPS 2) came out just a couple of years ago, and GTA V beat it by 60% on launch ($800m to $500m), inflation didn't play a significant role.
- Steko 13y agoThat just takes the argument in circles since the former #1 might not have been the inflation adjusted #1. It may be the case since "launches" weren't always such a big deal.
- leokun 13y agoWith films they also count ticket sales and the number of theaters a film is shown in. Those don't go up with inflation.
- iso-8859-1 13y agoThe worldwide population count is inflating, so the point still holds.
- incision 13y agoNot exactly. Box prices for video games have been remarkably static. New games were selling for $60 in 1993, just like GTA V is today instead of the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $97.
- blah32497 13y agoWhy hasn't this affected Take-Two's stock noticeably?
- polarix 13y agoStock market valuations take into account expectations, and this clearly met the market's expectations.
- stanmancan 13y agoI'm still confused by this though. Their market cap right now is about 1.5 billion. If GTA 5 sold $1 billion in 3 days, does that mean their whole valuation is based on this one single game??
- haldujai 13y agoValuation includes liabilities and is generally focused on profits not revenue (Amazon excepted). Take-two ended up losing 32 million last year on 1.2 billion in revenue. Take-two had a relatively large run up in July/August likely meaning that optimistic interpretations of GTA V were already priced in meaning people already factored the higher than normal profits this year.
- nether 13y agoBecause this meets expectations.
- revelation 13y agoThe important news here is that video games are surpassing other forms of entertainment. It is evidence of the disconnect between the media, politics and actual society: every other month you get discussions about video games causing violence and calls for legal restrictions. Compare this to movies, where you can produce the most violent splatter horror trash and nobody will bat an eye. Meanwhile, people are validating games as the work of art they are with hard dollars.
- Tloewald 13y agoSince when did hard dollars validate works of art? People are buying games -- art will take care of itself.
- grogenaut 13y ago"The important news here is that video games are surpassing other forms of entertainment." The games segment has been larger than Movies for quite a while.
- notdrunkatall 13y agoI haven't had cable in nearly a decade now. Does the media still use that old canard?
- pintglass 13y agoNot that I've seen. They went from the "the Columbine kids played Doom which is why they killed those people" more recently to "Guns kill people; We must get rid of guns", but even that is no longer in the news. The latest in the news is that conservatives want to shutdown the government and make poor people die without health care. But nothing about games. If they want bad publicity to help sell it, they'll need to have something like beastiality with a donkey hidden deep in the game somewhere.
- Pxtl 13y agoAnd yet every news release about the game mocks the horrific violence of the game and the neckbeards that play it. The generation and cultural gap between the news media and today's youth, especially young men, is astounding.
- yawaramin 13y agoAnd 100 in HN comments. Bazinga.