L01 Business Report | Rockstar Games / Rockstar North

Rockstar Games – Research

Structure

Rockstar Games is a video game development company and company created in 1998 to create ‘the most innovative and progressive interactive entertainment’ and is owned by Take-Two interactive. Based in New York City, Rockstar Games is commonly known for its AAA title Grand Theft Auto series. Rockstar Games are also commonly known to providing open world games with free play ability (no solid story line). The company comprises of several other acquired or renamed companies which have merged to create the Rockstar Brand.

Although Rockstar itself was created in New York City, the company was actually founded by English games designers Sam Houser and Dan Houser; both of whom are co-founders of the company. Rockstar games has also bought English games company BMG Interactive shortly after passing ownership to Take-Two interactive.

Platform Tech

Rockstar Games develop across multiple platforms, including games consoles Microsoft Xbox and Sony Playstation, aswell as having a huge market on the PC as well. Rockstar also have recently developed applications to run alongside their games on the mobile platform, and have also released some of their best games to the mobile platform aswell. Rockstar also have spent time developing for Apple Mac which is unusual due to the software and hardware limitations on these devices. Although Rockstar has developed multiple award winning games they are still yet to release console exclusives; in-game editor for Rockstar’s GTA V was originally thought to be only for the PC, which would have been a PC exclusive, however, due to the overwhelming success of this in game feature as a company the decision was made to release this content to gaming consoles aswell.

Game Types

Rockstar games develop across multiple different genres and game types, although most commonly they are well known across the world for their work on the Action, Drama and Freeplay genres with their award winning Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series following exactly that. Due to their popular success in their mature game development, it might come to some surprise that RockStar also have made games such as: ‘Rockstar games presents: Table Tennis’, a game developed for the Nintendo Wii console aimed at a younger audience and placed within the sports genre. The company have also developed games in the Racing, western and stealth genres as well.  

Games on multiple platforms

The majority of games created by rockstar appear over multiple platforms, mostly Xbox, Playstation (next generation and old generation) and PC. Games include all from the GTA series, Max Payne series and also the red dead redemption series. Some of rockstar’s GTA games have also now made it onto the mobile platform with the increased hardware capabilities over the past few years. The rockstar company has also taken a real step towards gaming over multiple platforms with new cloud features allowing gamers to transfer their in-game character wealth and content between consoles easily and simply.

Regulatory Bodies

Rockstar Games uses PEGI (Pan European Game Information) for it’s information board. PEGI is a games rating Information Company that states the legal age to purchase the game and could either be: 3, 7, 12, 16, or 18. Most of rockstar’s games fall under the 18 category however some of their games for (e.g) the Nintendo wii, fall under the ‘3’ category as they are aimed at younger children.

Development Software

Rockstar Games uses the RAGE (rockstar advanced game engine) which is developed by the RAGE Technology Group and was used to produce award winning games GTA V, Red dead redemption and Max Payne 3.  RAGE technology group is a company owned by rockstar san Diego and is not commercially available for other companies to use.