Governments around the world have expressed varied degrees of interest in regulating the sale of loot boxes in games, and we’ve seen games like CS:GO get their loot boxes adjusted or disabled in certain regions as a result. Take-Two is one of the biggest publishers in the world, and it’s no stranger to loot boxes – but CEO Strauss Zelnick says the new legislation isn’t too worrisome, because the company doesn’t profit much from loot boxes anyway.
“Just to put it in context, that mechanic is responsible for less than three percent of our net bookings in the past fiscal year, so it’s not material to us,” Zelnick says in the company’s latest earnings call (via PC Gamer.) Zelnick calls loot boxes a “a perfectly reasonable mechanic,” but says it “forms a very small part of our business.”
Take-Two reported about $2.929 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2019, which would put those loot box revenues right around $88 million. That’s a lot of money, just not a lot of money on the scale a major corporation operates at.
Back in 2017, Zelnick said every Take-Two game would have microtransactions from then on, and recurring purchases have formed no small part of continued revenue for the company. Just not necessarily loot boxes.
Read more: Check out the best free games on PC
Most recently, a US senator proposed a microtransaction bill which aims to protect kids from “compulsive microtransactions,” including loot boxes and other types of purchases. How this and other proposed legislation will affect publishers’ approaches to monetisation in the future remains to be seen.