Speaking at the Cowen and Company 45th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference today, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick talked about, among other things, microtransactions and said that while microtransactions are important to the company, they aren’t trying to nickel-and-dime players.
You can’t give stuff away for free in perpetuity; there’s no business model in that. But we’re not trying to optimise the monetiziation of everything we do to the nth degree. My concern is, if you do that, the consumer knows. They might not even know that they know, but they feel it.
Think about it anecdotally–when you paid a little too much for something, even if it was something really good, it really irks you. Paying too much for something bad is even worse. Paying too much for something really good, even if you can afford it, just leaves you with a bad feeling. We don’t want our consumers to ever feel that way.
Zelnick continued to say that the company was intentionally “undermonetizing” it’s users.
We are convinced that we are probably from an industry view undermonetizing on a per-user basis. There is wood to chop because I think we can do more, and we can do more without interfering with our strategy of being the most creative and our ethical approach, which is delighting consumers.
We’re not going to grab the last nickel.
Microtransactions have been big for Take-Two recently, the company’s Grand Theft Auto Online was one of the biggest earners in a recent SuperData report on digital games sales due to the title’s microtransactions. So it would be safe to expect that Take-Two’s future games will continue to feature microtransactions.
[Source: GameStop]
