Sony Got Grand Theft Auto III Deal For Cheap; Says Former Sony & Rockstar Staff

Sony’s and Rockstar Games’ former executives have made a surprising claim about Grand Theft Auto III and the PlayStation 2.

As most fans remember it, Sony secured an exclusivity deal for Grand Theft Auto III on the console. But younger fans may not realize that these games did also come to Xbox, as well as Windows, a year or so after the PlayStation 2.

So these weren’t full exclusivity deals that would have labeled Rockstar a second-party publisher to Sony. But it’s clear that Grand Theft Auto was a huge part of the PlayStation’s success, especially on the PlayStation 2.

Samuel Horti interviewed several former executives at Sony and Rockstar Games for IGN about the first deal the two parties made for Grand Theft Auto III. It’s fascinating reading, but there are some strange disputes on the details.

So there’s an odd haze of unreliability present in oral histories, but there was one interesting insight from these interviews.

Rockstar Thought Sony Made Out Like A Bandit

Kelly Sumner was head of Take-Two in the US at the time of the deal. He responded on former Sony exec David Reeves claiming that it was ‘remarkably cheap’ in an earlier interview with Eurogamer.

Sumner said this:

I think that’s in hindsight, either that or he’s the best poker player in the world. He certainly squeaked a bit when we did the deal.

We were very, very happy at the time. And I think Sony were very happy as well. Yes, it was cheap from what we now know…

I wish I could go back in time and renegotiate it and get a few more quid,” he says, chuckling again.

[But] also, it was more beneficial for Take Two and Rockstar than we thought it was going to be. So everyone won.

As we both know, both Grand Theft Auto III and the PlayStation 2 would turn out to be huge successes. That would have probably remained true either way, but the combination of the two elevated both to million dollar sales in the 2000s.

So one question naturally emerges.

What Deal Did Sony Make With Rockstar?

First things first, the deal was originally only for Europe. It expanded to the US just before launch, and the two sides negotiated further afterwards.

Zeno Colaço, who was vice president of publisher and developer relations at SCEE, claims it started with a co-marketing deal. Sony and Rockstar would both spend $ 1 million to market the game.

The second condition was for Sony to pay cash up front. Lastly, Rockstar requested Sony charge them less to produce Grand Theft Auto III discs.

Sumner explained this in his own words:

In those days, production costs were really, really expensive.

Basically for the right to buy a disc and have it packaged and delivered to your warehouse, I think in around 2000 is about $11 per disc…

And when you’re selling millions and millions of discs, which hopefully we were, any reduction on that is very nice, thank you very much.

Christopher Deering, who at that time was president of Sony in Europe, gave a ballpark figure of roughly $ 3. So Rockstar made Grand Theft Auto III PlayStation 2 discs for $ 8 instead of $ 11.

Ultimately, Grand Theft Auto III sold 11.6 million units on the PlayStation 2. As of March 2008, it had sold 14.5 million units overall.

That’s clearly an even bigger number now, adding the HD editions, mobile versions, and the remasters all into account. We can only wonder how different things could have been if Sony and Rockstar didn’t make this blockbuster, industry changing deal, all the way back in 2000.