GTA V had record microtransaction earnings in April 2020

Grand Theft Auto V made more money in April 2020 than it did in the last 7 years on the market, analyst firm SuperData reports.

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Grand Theft Auto V is a money-printing machine that just won't stop. GTA Online its single best month of microtransaction earnings in the game's seven-year history, outpacing 2019's massive surge with the Diamond Casino and Resort update. The news comes on the heels of the best-ever MAU growth as well as huge full game sales--GTA V has now sold-in 130 million copies worldwide, pushing 10 million copies in a quarter alone.

"Grand Theft Auto V saw its highest monthly spending on in-game content ever during April. The title will also see a significant boost to its PC player numbers in May due to a free giveaway that caused the Epic Games Store to crash," SuperData writes in its latest April games report.

We don't have raw figures on how much GTA Online or GTA V earned digitally in April, but the game managed to make over $500 million in microtransactions in 2019 alone, and total mTX revenues were up 40% YoY in Take-Two's FY20 period.

For more context, GTA Online made over $1 billion in revenues in 2017, and has since generated multiple times that amount.

May 2020 should be even bigger thanks to GTA V freebie on the Epic Games Store.

Take-Two expects GTA V and GTA Online to boost Q1'21's microtransactions by a colossal 75% year-over-year to over $540 million. Q1'21 is from April - June 2020 and includes last month's massive earnings jump.

"We project recurrent consumer spending to grow by approximately 75%," Take-Two CFO Lainie Goldstein said in the earnings call. "This growth is expected to be driven primarily by Grand Theft Auto Online and NBA 2K20."

"We also expect digitally delivered net bookings to double. Our forecast assumes that 81% of our current generation console game sales will be delivered digitally over 75% in the same period last year."

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