According to PlayStation veteran Chris Deering, Sony was anxious about the original Xbox and that concern prompted the company to sign an exclusivity deal with Take-Two for Grand Theft Auto.
“We were worried when we saw Xbox coming,” Deering recalled at a recent EGX event in London, as reported by GI.biz. “We knew exclusivity was the name of the game in a lot of fields.”
With that concern in mind, Deering said he approached third-party publishers and developers to ask if they would be interested in taking a “special deal” for timed exclusivity for any of their upcoming games. Deering and company didn’t realize GTA would become such a massive franchise, but that bet seemed to pay off, as GTA III took the series into a new direction with a 3D open-world approach.
“One of the deals we made was with Take-Two for the next three Grand Theft Auto games. At the time, it wasn’t clear that Grand Theft Auto III was going to be as huge as it was, because it used to be a top down game,” Deering said. “It was very lucky for us. And actually lucky for them, because they got a discount on the royalty they paid. Those deals aren’t uncommon in industries with platforms. Including today with things like social media.”
The original Xbox would go on to launch in November 2001, but GTA III did not show up on Xbox until November 2003. The timed-exclusivity deals extended Vice City and San Andreas.
While the exclusivity deals ended there–GTA 4 and GTA 5 launched on PlayStation and Xbox at the same time–Sony did continue to work with Rockstar on special deals. For example, GTA 5 was announced for PS4 at Sony’s E3 briefing in 2014. There is no word on if Rockstar has any special relationship with Sony or Microsoft for Grand Theft Auto VI, however.
As for Deering, he left Sony in 2005. He also made headlines recently when he said recent video game industry layoffs were not due to corporate greed alone, but are instead part of general macroeconomic conditions. Deering was roundly criticized for saying people who have been laid off can just “go to the beach for a year.”