Take-Two boss says he’s not interested in putting ads into premium games: ‘It would seem unfair’

Industry analyst Matthew Ball, who recently released a “State of Videogaming in 2026” report saying games are “losing the attention war,” also predicted that in-game advertising will become more prominent in PC and console games, as developers and publishers seek out new revenue streams. He reiterated that point in a subsequent interview with The Game Business:

“2K said last year that two and a half billion games of NBA 2K are played a year. I don’t know what 2K is thinking, but EA has teams working on ad deployments. If we think very basically… that’s two and a half billion games that were match made and have some loading screen. That’s such an extraordinary amount of inventory. Would Ford Mustang or The Avengers or Old Spice pay some pretty material sum for that inventory with a targeted, valuable audience? Of course.”

It sounds kind of terrible to my ears, but not really unreasonable, given the way things are—which is to say, kind of terrible. It does sound unreasonable to at least one person, though, and his opinion counts for a lot more than mine: Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick said in his own interview with The Game Business that he’s really not interested in the idea.

“For free-to-play titles, yes,” Zelnick said. “For titles for which you’ve paid 70 or 80 bucks? No. We have some limited advertising inside games like NBA 2K because it fits with the vernacular. You want to see advertising in a stadium, because you would if you were there in real life. But that’s not a big economic contributor.

“It’s difficult for me to believe that we would want to have interstitial advertising in a game that someone paid 70 or 80 bucks for. It would seem unfair.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that “fairness” is sometimes a flexible concept, especially in the world of big business, where everything, including high-minded principles, ultimately bows before the glowering god of commerce.

But it’s also fair to say that Take-Two basically is the glowering god of commerce: Zelnick also predicted that every console-owning adult on the planet is going to buy Grand Theft Auto 6, and hey, he’s probably not too wrong. Hopefully us PC gamers will have the same opportunity someday, but for now Take-Two and Rockstar are staying annoyingly mum about it.