After asking Rockstar to cough up $200,000, a hacker group has made good on its threats to release what it had dug up of the company's internal data. But the release of that information seems like it might actually have been a good thing for the Grand Theft Auto studio, as its parent company, Take-Two, just saw a massive boost to its stock price alongside the news.
Take-Two shares closed on April 13 at $201.36, representing a total market value of $37.28 billion. But that was before the leak had started to disseminate. Among other things, it revealed financial data suggesting that GTA Online makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 million per week. As it turns out, investors might like seeing those kinds of numbers.
When markets opened on April 14, Take-Two's shares jumped massively, as noted by Insider Gaming. Within an hour of the start of trading, the shares had gone up to $207.78, taking Take-Two's value to $38.48 billion – over a billion dollars worth of value instantly gained. Share prices settled down to $205.10 by the end of the day (bringing Take-Two's total value to $37.98 billion), but that's still a massive jump over the previous price.
These prices are still well below Take-Two's record share prices, which peaked above $260 per share last year. The publisher was among many whose stock value took a nosedive after investors caught wind of Google's Project Genie AI project, and prices have not fully recovered since then.
But hey, GTA 6 is on the horizon, and everybody seems to expect it to be the biggest thing the game industry has ever seen. That's maybe too much pressure to put on any one individual game, but if there's any title that can deliver on that sort of hyperbole, it's Rockstar's latest. I imagine Take-Two is probably just gritting its corporate teeth as it hopes investors will understand the difference between a real video game and an AI simulacrum this time around.
