GTA IV rakes in $500M in its 1st week
Dang! Take-two has sold approximately 6 million copies of the latest installment in its Grand Theft Auto series of video games. I won’t comment on the style of the video game, but I will comment on the financial windfall that this is for Take-Two. They’ve got some debt, but nothing that the $500 mil couldn’t take care of.
But think about this: the last release of GTA (Vice City Stories) was in Oct 2006, so they’ve been working on this latest release for at least 1.5 years. Let’s say it was 2 years. Let’s say they had 100 guys working on it averaging $100k each. That’s $20M over 2 years. Let’s double it to account for overhead expenses. So in 1 week, they’ve arguably made an 1100% return on their investment.
Yes, I could be completely wrong. I’m hardly a game insider or follow the field very closely. But even we said they had 10x the # of employees working on it (more than half of the company), they still would have made back their money and then some this past week. Very nice. Hmm… I wonder what kind of violent, non-PC game I could invent…?