Take-Two, 2K Games using GTA+ as unique version of Game Pass subscription

Take-Two Interactive has a unique answer to subscriptions--mingling its games in a cross-publisher catalog as part of Rockstar's popular GTA+ service.

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A few of gaming's biggest companies all have their own multi-subscription services; The Big 3 with Nintendo Switch Online, Xbox Game Pass, and PlayStation Plus, alongside publisher-specific offerings like Ubisoft+ and EA Play. But what about big players like Take-Two Interactive?

Instead of making a brand new subscription service to host catalog games, Take-Two apparently wants to rotate sports games into Rockstar's already-popular GTA+ subscription. This is something that I actually missed until now, but 2K Games/Take-Two have included NBA 2K26 as part of GTA+ for a bit now, yet the game is set to leave the service entirely on April 20. That's similar to how content rotates out of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass subscription, albeit at a much faster rate.

Take-Two is also doing something kind of different with this experiment by giving GTA+ subscribers a free permanent content pack with added in-game currency for NBA 2K26. This is meant to spark engagement and to get users to potentially purchase the game once it rotates out of GTA+.

NBA 2K26 is, and has been for weeks, the top #1 best-earning game on the PlayStation Store in terms of sales and revenue. This was due to a well-timed sale that saw the game discounted to just $17.49, and that price held for a while during the PS Store spring sale.

Putting a game like this on GTA+ also makes a lot of sense considering how big the service has become. The recent Rockstar Games leak reportedly exposed a bunch of data around GTA and even GTA+, noting that it had an all-time high subscriber count of over 1.3 million back in January of this year. This represents sizable additional revenues of $10.79 million for that month, and these earnings are higher-margin because Rockstar directly controls content access, at least on PC with its Rockstar Launcher.

The subscription's main selling point is, of course, all the bonuses offered for GTA Online. But Rockstar also added in classic games to the mix, allowing subscribers to play and access a bunch of older titles from the studio.

GTA+ was so successful that Rockstar raised the price from $5.99 to $7.99 per month to better capitalize on the content, and to help fund more value (this price hike coincided with Red Dead Redemption's inclusion on the service).

So why is this noteworthy? It's possible we could see GTA+ expand over time with new 2K games, and even if this was a one-off experiment, it shows Take-Two's willingness to put its content on a self-hosted subscription service for a temporary period.

In short, this is just another tactic that the publisher could use to extract more long-term value out of its annualized sports games, especially when the titles are older and technically counted as catalog releases.