Zelnick: No Brand Partnerships in GTA VI — “All the Brands Are Made Up”
At the iicon conference in Las Vegas, Take-Two’s CEO told IGN that GTA is “a fictional world and everything in it is fictional”, so real-world brand deals are not even on the table.
Confirmed — these are Strauss Zelnick’s own words, published by IGN from its interview at iicon, a conference for games executives in Las Vegas, on May 1. Zelnick is CEO of Take-Two, Rockstar’s parent company.
What he said: “We need to be true to the underlying intellectual property and we need to be true to our consumers… So in the case of GTA as a property, as you know, it’s a fictional world and everything in it is fictional. So we don’t have, for example, we’re not even at risk of doing brand partnerships because all the brands are made up. And I think that keeps us pure.”
The contrast he drew: 2K’s NBA series is different, he said, because brands “naturally exist” in real basketball, and “everyone knows if you push too hard with partnerships it’s a disaster.”
The limit of this story: Zelnick ruled out real-world brand partnerships. He did not say which parody brands appear in GTA VI.
Sources
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