Holding company Take-Two Interactive, which owns publishers Rockstar Games and 2K, released its SEC filing with investors on April 15th, and revealed over 300,000 newly registered company shares. Those shares are being issued to ZelnickMedia, Take-Two Interactive’s management company, in the form of Restricted Stock, which in technical terms doesn’t count under the company’s portfolio until certain stipulations are met. One of those stipulations, of course, is the amount of revenue earned from recurrent consumer spending, which can be summed up into how much money people are spending on microtransactions.
This essentially equates to big paydays for execs at Take-Two if the company is able to please investors by way of seeing a large enough cash flow from players once they’ve purchased a particular game. At the time of this writing, one share of Take-Two stock is priced at $90.41 per share, meaning when taking into account the amount of restricted stock dedicated to microtransaction incentives (between 13,986 and 27,972 shares), ZelnickMedia could potentially earn between $1.26 million and $2.52 million. Of those potential earnings, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick would receive the highest portion of said bonuses.
The talk of microtransactions isn’t something Take-Two will shy away from, either. Back in 2017, Zelnick confirmed the company would plan for all future Take-Two games to include microtransactions of some capacity. The company’s two biggest advocates in recent years for generating revenue have been the NBA 2k franchise and Grand Theft Auto 5, the most profitable form of entertainment ever between TV, Movies, and Video Games.
While the NBA 2K franchise releases a new game annually, GTA Online likely won’t be slowing down anytime soon. With the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive are in no rush to get the full version of Red Dead Online out of its beta phase until its sure the game’s online servers will hold up, a mistake infamously noted by the company during the opening weeks of GTA Online back in 2013.
Source: Kotaku
