The more money GTA Online makes, the more GTA Online content Rockstar makes. It's simple business strategy really. Take-Two recently released updated financial analytics showing that the sales for their massive blockbuster has just passed the $60 million mark.
You'd think a game that popular would benefit from story expansion DLC wouldn't you? After all, GTA has primarily always been a single player experience with focus on freedom and story. Mutiplayer mods and modes were available for previous games, however GTA Online was the first official large scale multiplayer venture of the franchise. So the focus is still on singleplayer, right?
Wrong. The very same financial data also showed that by far the largest source of revenue for Take-Two was micro-transactions in GTA Online. The game is notorious for its high in-game prices and slow cash accumulation.
Players have the opportunity to purchase Shark Cash Cards for real world money, filling up their in-game bank account. And at the same time Rockstar keeps up demand by releasing content-rich updates for absolutely free. Hard to complain right? The catch is that most DLC items, while awesome, are very, very expensive, giving players incentive to buy Shark Cards.
The system works extremely well. So well that Take-Two could practically live off Online. If you think about it from a corporate standpoint, why spend money on something like Story DLC that fewer people will buy, when those resources could be spent on a year's worth of free Online DLCs making a massive profit? This won't change either — Michael Pachter think that Online will make even more money this year.
the fervor with which players have embraced GTA Online suggests that it can deliver $250 million per year for several more years
Based on this reasoning alone you could bury any hopes of story DLC ever coming. But wait, it gets "worse".
Should Take-Two decide to make the game free-to-play [...] it is likely that overall revenues could double
We totally called it.
If GTA Online is going F2P, are you jumping ship?
