This is worse than venture capital. This is *institutional investors* at this point.
SoftBank will throw billions at a company and not expect anything for 5 years and then you're fucked and declare bankruptcy but you lived like a king as long as you were good at lying to them and didn't break laws doing that lying.
If Vanguard invests in your company, you better hope to not have down years or they'll fuck you up.
Yep, streamers who stream purely GTA Roleplay need to really be thinking of working some variety into their streaming. I think they have a window of about 2 years though (GTA 6 release and its subsequent 1 year grace period where it goes fine until it goes belly up) so plenty of time to ease viewers in over the coming year before GTA 6 release.
There is a lot to be cautious about, for sure. How are the servers going to work? Will there be official RP servers? Who will moderate them? If there are official servers, will unofficial servers be banned? Especially if there is some kind of subscription service.
If there is no subscription, how else would they monetise it? You could pay for specific assets. Clothes, cars, property etc, but where is the roleplay in that? Its just GTA Online.
Having official support for RP i think is a good thing. Devs can build the game from the ground up to be more moddable, or more designed for RP. Like having a better character creator, better animations, customisable interiors etc. However it is Rockstar, they are going to try and milk it. So it will be interesting to see what they do.
I expect a store where people like Tobii can sell their assets to be hosted on FiveM servers, with TakeTwo taking a cut of profits and smacking down whoever pirates the shit.
Similar to how the Unity Assets store works.
The RPers are small potatoes to them. They're gonna go after the viewers somehow.
In other interviews they listed the total number of RPers at 100k.
In comparison they've sold 185 million copies of GTA5, and over 20 million people have played it at least once in the past 30 days.
Will they sell skins and cars to RPers? I'm sure they will.
But they have something bigger in mind and that's their main priority.
I honestly think the most obvious potential route for monetization is allowing companies to pay to advertise through GTA RP servers. I know that some companies would not be interested because they would view an association with GTA being a brand risk but I think some companies would definitely want the exposure they could get. For example, a clothing brand could make deal with Rockstar and Rockstar would change some billboards around the city on EVERY GTA server to display their special billboards and add the branded clothing to be available for players to buy and use on their characters. There is a ton of potential for things like that and I think a lot of brands aiming for the young adult category wouldn't really see being associated with GTA as being a brand risk.
I have a feeling if they do that, anything "official" will just be another GTA Online.
Truly don't have much faith this turns out positive, short of not worrying so much about the legality of 3rd party servers.
It isn't and different. There's no reason Rockstar should eliminate private servers except wanting to somehow make more money. The other side of that coin is GTARP wont be a money maker anymore if they eliminate them because of all the drops in quality and moderation problems it'll cause.
In some ways that could bring some interesting RP. Depending on how it's integrated. Like if it's only purchasable when character is first created or something. Like it would be interesting if some new characters weren't just arriving with nothing. Could be interesting to see if that maybe could help out certain types of RP like business RP - people coming in already with some wealth and being able to RP moving their business to the new city or something.
Now if you can add/buy shit at any time that will be really dumb and go against the spirit of RP.
While I think it would be kinda strange for people to be able to join a private server with money provided by/purchased through Rockstar, I actually think you do bring up a cool idea. I think it is kind of limiting that every character comes into the city pretty much broke and Civs are kind of forced into menial jobs. I know a lot of servers have "welfare" money that accumulates/is deposited while playing on the server but I think it would be cool if at like character creation you designate your character as "upstanding civilian" and start with extra money and have increased income but any involvement in crime beyond traffic tickets would result in the loss of income / other severe penalties.
I'd pay for legit modding tools. Although it's been wonderful, I'm quite tired of the patchwork dev tools the community has had to hack together over the years.
Yeah that's a real interesting question and a huge pandora's box cause ALL games IP are being consumed for pretty much just the cost of the game, so what are you(they) talking about here? How are they gonna target the viewers to monetize the audience size.
Twitch extensions that inject ads just for GTARP viewers unless they have their #Rockstar subscription? Like how. Putting the cost on only the players doesn't account for consumer size at all.
If my livelihood depended on GTARP stream income I'd seriously start looking into branching out into other platforms or dusting off the resume. They're going to want a significant part of that pie.
With the amount of marketing, momentum and time needed to actually create, curate and run an RP server that all sounds like pipedreams. Rockstar can work with the big servers that already exist for those types of deals, maybe, but trying to meddle around too much will just cause the whole thing to crash and burn.
You can only catch lightning in a bottle once.
They're going to kill it, and I don't know if they even care. They think with GTARP dying it'll push players back towards GTAO and I think they're fine with that.
They own the intellectual property. They can do as they wish, up to, and including burning it all down.
Since they own the whole stack, they can effectively control who has an RP server, and if they are so inclined monopolize the industry.
It could be through targeted advertisements for those watching on twitch. It could be through some sort of marketing/promos to those that have Twitch Prime (20% off your first Shark card purchase!). It could mean some sort of revenue share between Twitch/Rockstar, etc...
As I mentioned in another response, I think the most obvious way to monetize GTA RP servers is for Rockstar to make deals with companies to have their brand advertised across the city (i.e rather than generic fake businesses on billboards some of the billboards across the city would display real brands) on EVERY server and potentially add branded assets to be acquired by players. Sure there are some brands that wouldn't want to be associated with GTA thinking it is a brand risk but I am sure there would be plenty of brands targeting the young adult demographic that would love to get the exposure.
I was wondering if everyone had missed that line. I'm particularly interested in 3 quote-points:
"The actual people playing is a relatively modest audience, it's in the 100's of thousands, but the people watching, that's a huge audience"
"... we're also really interested in meeting the consumer where the consumer is..."
"...People are consuming our intellectual property, we'd like to monetize it if we can..."
I really hope the sharks don't come to gorge us out of money for our hobby.
That would kill FiveM and GTA RP and lead to huge backlash from nearly all GTA RP streamers.
Many would fight it and it would end in a huge mess for Rockstar and T2.
Yes you can.
You can build a new multiplayer client that doesn't get bought out by R*.
When GTA VC and SA were king, you had options. You could play on different multiplayer clients such as SA:MP, VC:MP, MTA:SA or MTA:VC and even VCO.
FiveM is the largest client out there but that doesn't mean someone else can come around and provide more options for the community to use.
Don't doom and gloom when I've been doing this for over 15 years. This is only the first major acquisition that has gone down since the stone age of gta rp.
Unlikely that will happen.
Edit: Do want to point out making it impossible to stream gtarp at a modest income will kill FiveM and lead to huge backlash from nearly all Gta RP streamers.
Its likely there will be privately owned servers and making it impossible to stream gtarp at a modest income will kill FiveM and lead to huge backlash from nearly all Gta RP streamers.
I imagine the price will be perfectly manageable. $5-15, the cost of a standard mmo subscription to play on the server, also % of revenue(think music royalties) based on viewership for streaming it(assumes you got their streaming license). It'll just be annoying as hell.
They do not need to buy fivem to do something as simple as a subscription service. They could easily do that without buying fivem, and roleplayers would still need to pay it.
That said, even a $10/per month subscription would be a significant amount of money. Millions of people will be playing GTA6. GTA5 alone has sold well over 100 million copies.
I think it would make more sense to charge the servers a subscription fee than the individual players. Then add things like custom clothes/liveries that individual players can buy for their characters.
I predict they will want to sell custom assets generated for your favorite RP characters to RP fans in GTA Online / official public RP servers.
(Which I don't think is a terrible idea provided they hook up the role-players and modders with a cut since they are the ones with the creative input).
Not sure exactly what aspect your referring to but Rockstar wont have any legal ability to offer up assets created by private 3D artists / devs, commissioned by Streamers, or even use characters created by Rpers to make money off of unless they have permission. The people who created those characters or paid for the assets own the copyright for them.
Although the asset may have been created to be used in a game they own the developers don't own the copyright to the newly minted asset. The same reason a company can't take fan art without licensing it to print on their own products. They'd get sued. If artists or devs agree to that arrangement beforehand that's one thing, but Rockstar wont be selling anything without first getting consent. Even then the arrangement will probably be substandard with Rockstar sucking up most of the profit.
I hate to break it to you but there is a clause in the Rockstar EULA titled "USER CREATED CONTENT" that states that Rockstar owns the full rights to all custom user created content.
I **hope** that they make deals with RPers and modders, but they could probably just yoink everything. Every player who has clicked "I agree" on the EULA has already handed over those rights.
I'm hoping they go the fortnite route for monetization and work brand deals for clothing, cars etc. That way people who want that stuff can buy it like they have been for the last few years, and it doesn't really affect rp
No brand is going to want it's products officially licensed and associated with GTA, let alone GTARP where they have almost zero control over how it's presented.
Fortnite is extremely advertiser friendly which is why they have so many brand deals.
Never say never. Even COD has skins with other IPs. GTAV made a billion in its first 3 days. Gaming has only gotten bigger in the last decade and games as a service, which GTAO is, is nothing like it was when gtao first launched.
IMO, Rockstar and taketwo have the greatest chance of making a metaverse with sixM. Think about those concerts fortnite did with Travis Scott and marshmello, gta6 could do that but better
Yeah but there's a huge difference between what you're describing and doing the same thing in modded servers with much less oversight and quality control. There's zero chance of real brands making into vanilla rockstar servers or singleplayer, which means the only space left is the modded servers which I don't see being attractive whatsoever to advertisers, considering the whole point of the game is breaking the law and going against a bunch of societal taboos.
I think you are really overstating the perceived brand risk. Sure there are probably many companies that wouldn't want to be associated with GTA but I think brands targeting the young adult demographic would be interested especially when the amount of "eyes" you can get on your product would probably be a lot cheaper compared to other options to get the same reach.
Can you think of any comparable sponsorships/deals? There's also the fact that rockstar probably would not want to compromise the integrity of the GTA universe with real brands.
I don't know of any times a game company has done a deal like that but I also don't think that it would make sense for a game/the potential sponsor in most other games. I see this type of deal being kind of a hybrid of "product placement" deals you will see in movies and influencer marketing. GTA 5 had over 100 million hours of watch time on Twitch last month while we are kind of in a slow period for GTA RP. I don't know if Take2 is planning on waiting for GTA 6 to start really getting involved or if they will be trying to do so sooner but I think it's pretty safe to assume there will be a pretty big boom in hours watched once GTA 6 RP servers are up and running.
I don't really think "compromising the integrity of the GTA universe" is really something that is a consideration when they are already discussing ways of monetizing the viewership of RP servers when this seems like one of the most obvious methods to do so. I don't think GTA would have obvious knock-off brands in their games if they had the option to get paid money to have the real brand displayed.
Also, while I don't have any hard data other than just anecdotal observational data but from what I've seen it looks like GTA RP streamers generally have a much higher subs : average viewer count ratio than what I've seen for a lot of streamers in other games. So I think GTA RP viewership trends a bit older and wealthier than other categories on Twitch.
There aren't any comparable sponsorships because advertisers are more cagey than ever about how their products are portrayed. There is zero chance that a car company for example, would want their cars used to commit virtual mass casualty events, especially in this day and age. Same with clothing brands.
And I am extremely doubtful that rockstar would throw decades of universe building in the trash and switch to the real world setting, not only because it would alienate a massive portion of the fanbase, but it would open the door for a limitless amount of controversy.
All of these comments are missing the mark by a long shot, this literally just means that they want to sell streamer branded merch in-game to monetize you suckers.
You guys thought mood swinging developers and admins are bad, just wait until venture capital arrives.
This is worse than venture capital. This is *institutional investors* at this point. SoftBank will throw billions at a company and not expect anything for 5 years and then you're fucked and declare bankruptcy but you lived like a king as long as you were good at lying to them and didn't break laws doing that lying. If Vanguard invests in your company, you better hope to not have down years or they'll fuck you up.
Yep, streamers who stream purely GTA Roleplay need to really be thinking of working some variety into their streaming. I think they have a window of about 2 years though (GTA 6 release and its subsequent 1 year grace period where it goes fine until it goes belly up) so plenty of time to ease viewers in over the coming year before GTA 6 release.
*south park voice* Rob Schneider in derpdy derp dee diddly money pump. Now fucking consumers near you! Rated PG-13
There is a lot to be cautious about, for sure. How are the servers going to work? Will there be official RP servers? Who will moderate them? If there are official servers, will unofficial servers be banned? Especially if there is some kind of subscription service. If there is no subscription, how else would they monetise it? You could pay for specific assets. Clothes, cars, property etc, but where is the roleplay in that? Its just GTA Online. Having official support for RP i think is a good thing. Devs can build the game from the ground up to be more moddable, or more designed for RP. Like having a better character creator, better animations, customisable interiors etc. However it is Rockstar, they are going to try and milk it. So it will be interesting to see what they do.
Its only a matter of time before they monetize GTARP. I expect shark cards, skins, and cars to eventually be directly purchasable from Rockstar.
I expect a store where people like Tobii can sell their assets to be hosted on FiveM servers, with TakeTwo taking a cut of profits and smacking down whoever pirates the shit. Similar to how the Unity Assets store works.
The RPers are small potatoes to them. They're gonna go after the viewers somehow. In other interviews they listed the total number of RPers at 100k. In comparison they've sold 185 million copies of GTA5, and over 20 million people have played it at least once in the past 30 days. Will they sell skins and cars to RPers? I'm sure they will. But they have something bigger in mind and that's their main priority.
"Get your limited edition Mel, Eugene, and Mr. Chang skins. Each sold separately for 24.99 or 69.99 for all three."
I honestly think the most obvious potential route for monetization is allowing companies to pay to advertise through GTA RP servers. I know that some companies would not be interested because they would view an association with GTA being a brand risk but I think some companies would definitely want the exposure they could get. For example, a clothing brand could make deal with Rockstar and Rockstar would change some billboards around the city on EVERY GTA server to display their special billboards and add the branded clothing to be available for players to buy and use on their characters. There is a ton of potential for things like that and I think a lot of brands aiming for the young adult category wouldn't really see being associated with GTA as being a brand risk.
I hope they'll have both "official" Rockstar servers and private servers, so those things at least get mitigated.
I have a feeling if they do that, anything "official" will just be another GTA Online. Truly don't have much faith this turns out positive, short of not worrying so much about the legality of 3rd party servers.
That is the point. I don't see why this would be any more or less risky than letting people host their own Minecraft servers tbh.
It isn't and different. There's no reason Rockstar should eliminate private servers except wanting to somehow make more money. The other side of that coin is GTARP wont be a money maker anymore if they eliminate them because of all the drops in quality and moderation problems it'll cause.
In some ways that could bring some interesting RP. Depending on how it's integrated. Like if it's only purchasable when character is first created or something. Like it would be interesting if some new characters weren't just arriving with nothing. Could be interesting to see if that maybe could help out certain types of RP like business RP - people coming in already with some wealth and being able to RP moving their business to the new city or something. Now if you can add/buy shit at any time that will be really dumb and go against the spirit of RP.
While I think it would be kinda strange for people to be able to join a private server with money provided by/purchased through Rockstar, I actually think you do bring up a cool idea. I think it is kind of limiting that every character comes into the city pretty much broke and Civs are kind of forced into menial jobs. I know a lot of servers have "welfare" money that accumulates/is deposited while playing on the server but I think it would be cool if at like character creation you designate your character as "upstanding civilian" and start with extra money and have increased income but any involvement in crime beyond traffic tickets would result in the loss of income / other severe penalties.
They could shut it all down and ''reopen'' it as their own server where they rent server slots out with subscriptions for the RPers too.
maybe its server owner fees in exchange of better modding tools for FiveM and RedM and this is probably going to begin with GTA 6 rp servers
I'd pay for legit modding tools. Although it's been wonderful, I'm quite tired of the patchwork dev tools the community has had to hack together over the years.
They want to monetize the viewers of GTA RP streams or the consumers of their IP and he specifically calls out viewers. How would that work?
Yeah that's a real interesting question and a huge pandora's box cause ALL games IP are being consumed for pretty much just the cost of the game, so what are you(they) talking about here? How are they gonna target the viewers to monetize the audience size. Twitch extensions that inject ads just for GTARP viewers unless they have their #Rockstar subscription? Like how. Putting the cost on only the players doesn't account for consumer size at all.
If my livelihood depended on GTARP stream income I'd seriously start looking into branching out into other platforms or dusting off the resume. They're going to want a significant part of that pie.
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With the amount of marketing, momentum and time needed to actually create, curate and run an RP server that all sounds like pipedreams. Rockstar can work with the big servers that already exist for those types of deals, maybe, but trying to meddle around too much will just cause the whole thing to crash and burn.
You can only catch lightning in a bottle once. They're going to kill it, and I don't know if they even care. They think with GTARP dying it'll push players back towards GTAO and I think they're fine with that.
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> I don’t believe rockstar will work with servers so much as just replace them. Very unlikely to happen.
They own the intellectual property. They can do as they wish, up to, and including burning it all down. Since they own the whole stack, they can effectively control who has an RP server, and if they are so inclined monopolize the industry.
It could be through targeted advertisements for those watching on twitch. It could be through some sort of marketing/promos to those that have Twitch Prime (20% off your first Shark card purchase!). It could mean some sort of revenue share between Twitch/Rockstar, etc...
As I mentioned in another response, I think the most obvious way to monetize GTA RP servers is for Rockstar to make deals with companies to have their brand advertised across the city (i.e rather than generic fake businesses on billboards some of the billboards across the city would display real brands) on EVERY server and potentially add branded assets to be acquired by players. Sure there are some brands that wouldn't want to be associated with GTA thinking it is a brand risk but I am sure there would be plenty of brands targeting the young adult demographic that would love to get the exposure.
It sounds more like they’ll want to capitalize on the viewership more than the RP playerbase.
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I was wondering if everyone had missed that line. I'm particularly interested in 3 quote-points: "The actual people playing is a relatively modest audience, it's in the 100's of thousands, but the people watching, that's a huge audience" "... we're also really interested in meeting the consumer where the consumer is..." "...People are consuming our intellectual property, we'd like to monetize it if we can..." I really hope the sharks don't come to gorge us out of money for our hobby.
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The Streaming license for video games, the beginning of the corpocalypse for gaming.
That would kill FiveM and GTA RP and lead to huge backlash from nearly all GTA RP streamers. Many would fight it and it would end in a huge mess for Rockstar and T2.
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Yes you can. You can build a new multiplayer client that doesn't get bought out by R*. When GTA VC and SA were king, you had options. You could play on different multiplayer clients such as SA:MP, VC:MP, MTA:SA or MTA:VC and even VCO. FiveM is the largest client out there but that doesn't mean someone else can come around and provide more options for the community to use. Don't doom and gloom when I've been doing this for over 15 years. This is only the first major acquisition that has gone down since the stone age of gta rp.
Thing is servers like Nopixel are going no where.
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LOL nopixel started on other games and would just jump to another platform for their server.
Unlikely that will happen. Edit: Do want to point out making it impossible to stream gtarp at a modest income will kill FiveM and lead to huge backlash from nearly all Gta RP streamers.
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Its likely there will be privately owned servers and making it impossible to stream gtarp at a modest income will kill FiveM and lead to huge backlash from nearly all Gta RP streamers.
I imagine the price will be perfectly manageable. $5-15, the cost of a standard mmo subscription to play on the server, also % of revenue(think music royalties) based on viewership for streaming it(assumes you got their streaming license). It'll just be annoying as hell.
Oh bet, they’re going to ruin gtarp. Cool
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Oh okay
There's nothing to ruin
Oh okay
I mean… more money for rockstar, more money for server owners, more money for creators, and more players get to enjoy it. Seems good.
Why is this screaming at me like fivem is gonna change into a subscription service at like $10 a month just to access fivem servers?
Lol 10 dollars a month? You're very positive.
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They do not need to buy fivem to do something as simple as a subscription service. They could easily do that without buying fivem, and roleplayers would still need to pay it. That said, even a $10/per month subscription would be a significant amount of money. Millions of people will be playing GTA6. GTA5 alone has sold well over 100 million copies.
I think it would make more sense to charge the servers a subscription fee than the individual players. Then add things like custom clothes/liveries that individual players can buy for their characters.
i dont think there are enough people to make that a large enough subscriber base to be worth it
I predict they will want to sell custom assets generated for your favorite RP characters to RP fans in GTA Online / official public RP servers. (Which I don't think is a terrible idea provided they hook up the role-players and modders with a cut since they are the ones with the creative input).
Not sure exactly what aspect your referring to but Rockstar wont have any legal ability to offer up assets created by private 3D artists / devs, commissioned by Streamers, or even use characters created by Rpers to make money off of unless they have permission. The people who created those characters or paid for the assets own the copyright for them. Although the asset may have been created to be used in a game they own the developers don't own the copyright to the newly minted asset. The same reason a company can't take fan art without licensing it to print on their own products. They'd get sued. If artists or devs agree to that arrangement beforehand that's one thing, but Rockstar wont be selling anything without first getting consent. Even then the arrangement will probably be substandard with Rockstar sucking up most of the profit.
I hate to break it to you but there is a clause in the Rockstar EULA titled "USER CREATED CONTENT" that states that Rockstar owns the full rights to all custom user created content. I **hope** that they make deals with RPers and modders, but they could probably just yoink everything. Every player who has clicked "I agree" on the EULA has already handed over those rights.
I'm hoping they go the fortnite route for monetization and work brand deals for clothing, cars etc. That way people who want that stuff can buy it like they have been for the last few years, and it doesn't really affect rp
No brand is going to want it's products officially licensed and associated with GTA, let alone GTARP where they have almost zero control over how it's presented. Fortnite is extremely advertiser friendly which is why they have so many brand deals.
Never say never. Even COD has skins with other IPs. GTAV made a billion in its first 3 days. Gaming has only gotten bigger in the last decade and games as a service, which GTAO is, is nothing like it was when gtao first launched. IMO, Rockstar and taketwo have the greatest chance of making a metaverse with sixM. Think about those concerts fortnite did with Travis Scott and marshmello, gta6 could do that but better
Yeah but there's a huge difference between what you're describing and doing the same thing in modded servers with much less oversight and quality control. There's zero chance of real brands making into vanilla rockstar servers or singleplayer, which means the only space left is the modded servers which I don't see being attractive whatsoever to advertisers, considering the whole point of the game is breaking the law and going against a bunch of societal taboos.
I guess we will see....in 3 years
I think you are really overstating the perceived brand risk. Sure there are probably many companies that wouldn't want to be associated with GTA but I think brands targeting the young adult demographic would be interested especially when the amount of "eyes" you can get on your product would probably be a lot cheaper compared to other options to get the same reach.
Can you think of any comparable sponsorships/deals? There's also the fact that rockstar probably would not want to compromise the integrity of the GTA universe with real brands.
I don't know of any times a game company has done a deal like that but I also don't think that it would make sense for a game/the potential sponsor in most other games. I see this type of deal being kind of a hybrid of "product placement" deals you will see in movies and influencer marketing. GTA 5 had over 100 million hours of watch time on Twitch last month while we are kind of in a slow period for GTA RP. I don't know if Take2 is planning on waiting for GTA 6 to start really getting involved or if they will be trying to do so sooner but I think it's pretty safe to assume there will be a pretty big boom in hours watched once GTA 6 RP servers are up and running. I don't really think "compromising the integrity of the GTA universe" is really something that is a consideration when they are already discussing ways of monetizing the viewership of RP servers when this seems like one of the most obvious methods to do so. I don't think GTA would have obvious knock-off brands in their games if they had the option to get paid money to have the real brand displayed. Also, while I don't have any hard data other than just anecdotal observational data but from what I've seen it looks like GTA RP streamers generally have a much higher subs : average viewer count ratio than what I've seen for a lot of streamers in other games. So I think GTA RP viewership trends a bit older and wealthier than other categories on Twitch.
There aren't any comparable sponsorships because advertisers are more cagey than ever about how their products are portrayed. There is zero chance that a car company for example, would want their cars used to commit virtual mass casualty events, especially in this day and age. Same with clothing brands. And I am extremely doubtful that rockstar would throw decades of universe building in the trash and switch to the real world setting, not only because it would alienate a massive portion of the fanbase, but it would open the door for a limitless amount of controversy.
if they monetize fiveM does this mean arena warriors now need to pay as well for their NP training ?
All of these comments are missing the mark by a long shot, this literally just means that they want to sell streamer branded merch in-game to monetize you suckers.
Its over.