Take-Two CEO wants to monetize FiveM GTA Online RP servers

Rockstar purchased the team behind popular community servers this year

During Take-Two’s latest earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick confirmed his intention to monetize community-made servers using FiveM and RedM, which Rockstar officially absorbed earlier this year by purchasing Cfx.re, the team providing those servers and tools. FiveM and RedM enable users to run their own servers for GTA Online and Red Dead Online using custom content. The tools are most famously being used by role-playing communities, which in turn have audiences on Twitch and YouTube.

Responding to a question by a shareholder about the possibilities opened by this acquisition, the CEO explained that the absorption of Cfx.re was interesting in two ways, as it brought different communities under the company’s wing: “Number one, the people actually playing in role-playing servers; and number two, the people watching what they're doing on Twitch.”

Cfx.re was acquired by Rockstar Games earlier this year / Rockstar Games

Zelnick emphasized that the number of actual role-players is relatively small at just a few hundred thousand, but that the audience watching this sort of content was many times larger.

“We're also really interested in meeting the consumer where the consumer is,” he stated.

However, that doesn’t even seem to have been the driving force behind the acquisition from his perspective, which instead is IP protection.

“We're interested in, first of all, making sure that our intellectual property is protected,” Zelnick added. “And finally, if people are consuming our intellectual property, we would like to monetize it if we can. We think this gives us an opportunity to do all of the above.”

Rockstar and Take-Two have been very sensitive when it comes to modding games like GTA and Red Dead Redemption, often taking down user-made content. Reading between the lines, the choice seemingly was between going after FiveM and RedM with the gloves off, which would have risked a massive PR disaster, or acquiring Cfx.re to integrate its efforts into Rockstar’s wider operations – the goal of IP protection could be reached either way.

Zelnick did not mention any details on how this monetization would work – most role-play servers currently keep the lights on through Patreon subscriptions. It’s possible that Rockstar will roll RP server access into its GTA+ subscription service in the future, but that’s just speculation at this point. In any case, it looks like Cfx.re will be integrated into things a lot closer in the future – even into GTA 6, perhaps, which is going to get its first trailer in December 2023.