Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick answered some questions about the Grand Theft Auto series in a recent interview. He spoke about the monetization of GTA Online and plans for GTA 6.
According to Strauss Zelnick, GTA Online most likely will not integrate real life brands. He mentioned that since the world of the game is completely fictional, the real brands won't be a great fit with it. However such advertising need to be truly iconic and fit into the features of the Grand Theft Auto gaming universe if it will be done. This decision not to use real brands was largely made by the Rockstar Games team.
The head of Take-Two also spoke about how the company predicts the success of the new GTA.
We would look at the title itself and how we think it's going
to perform, the Metacritic scores we expect to get... We'll do
mock Metacritic scoring prior to release. We're usually
reasonably good at predicting. Typically we beat our guidance,
and that's a reflection of working really hard to do so, not a
reflection of somehow cutting the guidance down.