With proper GTA 6 info coming soon, one of the big question marks is what Rockstar's acquisition of the devs behind the biggest GTA RP mods will mean for the upcoming game. That question was partially addressed at a recent earnings call for Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive.
"During the quarter Rockstar Games announced that CitizenFX, the team behind the FiveM and RedM role-playing communities for Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, officially joined the label," Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said in his prepared remarks. "With their immense passion and creativity, CitizenFX has been pivotal in expanding the possibilities of user-generated content around Rockstar's leading titles. We're excited to see them continue to build these creative communities and help them thrive into the future."
That certainly seems to imply that the CitizenFX team will continue building similar RP features for GTA 6, and Zelnick had a few more telling comments about the monetization potential for that sort of content during a Q&A session later in the call.
"To be clear, this is a small economic opportunity right now, and a small cost to us," Zelnick opened, suggesting that the company isn't planning on making monetized RP content a huge part of its initial rollout. Instead, Zelnick says that Take-Two and Rockstar "want to be where the consumer is," and there are two groups that this acquisition helps them connect with.
"Number one, the people who are actually playing role-playing servers, and number two, the people who are watching what they're doing on Twitch. Both are really interesting. The actual people playing is a relatively modest audience - it's in the hundreds of thousands - but the people watching, that's a huge audience," Zelnick explains.
"We're interested in first of all, making sure that our intellectual property is protected. We're also really interested in meeting the consumer where the consumer is, and for certain consumers modding is a really important activity. And finally, if people are consuming our intellectual property, we would like to monetize it if we can. We think this gives us an opportunity to do all of the above."
You probably could've guessed that GTA 6 was coming just based on the wild popularity of its predecessors, but the extensive leaks and official acknowledgement of them from Rockstar have left no room to doubt. Things got a lot more official earlier today, as Rockstar has confirmed the "first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto" will be released in December.
There are still plenty of new games for 2023 to enjoy before we get to GTA 6.
