Take-Two announced boosted consumer spending of 24% in the second quarter earnings review. This is said to have moved consumer spending to a new record altogether. Take-Two is the parent company of the New York based American video game publisher, Rockstar games.
Strauss Zelnick who is the CEO of Take-Two shared that the boost was Grand Theft Auto’s biggest content launch in history. This he continued to explain was evident owing to the high record player engagement.
Record player engagement was maintained on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This was the case especially for the months of July and August. This recurrent consumer spending is what determines the total revenue in the long run.
Gamasutra explains that the regular consumer spending to be a metric with which in-game acquired revenue can be tracked. Consumer spending sources include; digital games, premium currency, other goods and content.
Since GTA was launched in2013, the Diamond Casino had always featured the sign “opening soon”. The virtual casino is located in Hollywood-like neighborhood known as Vinewood. Vinewood is located in Los Santos a fictional city that is found in San Andreas state (also fictional).
The casino was launched in July after a five-year long wait that prompted players into a guessing game of what the casino entailed. During those five years, players were denied access to the casino.
After being launched, Diamond Casino came with a number of add-ons most notably, new missions, new cars and other awesome bonuses. The new missions all aim to protect the casino from a gang of investors while the new cars add variety to your garage.
As for the extra goodies, you can earn a penthouse suite which you are allowed to decorate as you see fit. There’s also a playable casino floor full of slot machines, black jack, three-card poker among others.
Rockstar took longer to launch the casino compared to Wynn Resorts’ Encore Boston Harbor. The harbor came with a construction cost of $2.5 billion. There was also the issue of decontaminating the chemical plant that was to become the new harbor. Despite all these requirements, the harbor launched earlier.
For GTA, players are unable to gamble or cash out real cash but are instead required to buy in-game currency using the real money. Diamond Casino therefore works like a social casino game. In-game transactions have controversies around them which forced Rockstar to really take its time in the casino update.
The casino has been banned in fifty jurisdictions around the globe since the countries have unclear laws regarding in-game transactions and social gaming. To come up with this conclusion, Rockstar had to negotiate on global regulations which partly explain the five year delay.
Players from countries that have been blacklisted were definitely shocked to find out that they could still not access the casino even after the long wait. And the reason for their denied access is simply their geographical location.
With the consumer spending boost, it is quite clear that Take-Two and Rockstar are unaffected by the backlash by disgruntled gamers as reported by Casino.org. The ban also hasn’t affected the company’s revenue.
