Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick shared an interesting perspective on in-game ads.
Strauss was interviewed by Christopher Dring’s The Game Business. Dring asked him about an idea Matthew Ball brought up in his State of Gaming report for 2026, that game companies would start adding in-game ads to help compensate development costs.
If you expected Strauss to skirt around the issue or try to make excuses for it, that’s not what he did. He said this:
Well, for free-to-play titles, yes. For titles for which you’ve paid 70 or 80 bucks, no.
We have some limited advertising inside games like NBA 2K because that, you know, it fits with the vernacular. You want to see advertising in in an arena, you know, in a stadium because you would if you were there in real life.
Um, but that’s not a big economic contributor.
Take-Two owns GTA, NBA 2K, and also Zynga, so they’re familiar with all the business models in gaming today. It seems their data says the money isn’t actually there for ideas like this. There is such a thing as being smart enough to not be too greedy.