Martyn Ware, founding member and songwriter for the British synthpop band Heaven 17, have publicly revealed the band rejected a deal by Rockstar Games to feature one of its songs, Temptation, in the upcoming game Grand Theft Auto VI.
In a thread of two tweets, Ware revealed how much the offer was to put Temptation in GTA VI: “$7,500 – for a buyout of any future royalties for the game forever…”.
That meant the deal would have been a flat sum with no cuts to any future revenue the highly anticipated open world game about doing crimes will acrue.
Ware pointed out that the previous game, GTA V have grossed over $8.6 billion. A recent filing by Rockstar parent company Take-Two confirms that since GTA V’s launch in 2014, the game has pushed the game’s overall revenue over at least $8.33 billion as of the company’s Fiscal Year 2023.
A flat rate of $7,500 for a place in an upcoming game from a series that have multi-million sales is definitely something that isn’t tempting for a band of Heaven 17’s stature. It’s enough to have one of its members to explicitly and publicly say “go f*** yourself” regarding the deal.
Licensing deals will always be tricky. Many games have since been delisted due to expired license deals where publishers don’t see it’s worth extending or re-negotiating those deals again when sales have slowed down.
Rockstar Games themselves have experienced this as they re-released GTA IV on PS4, Xbox One and PC with major changes to the soundtrack from its original PS3, Xbox 360 and PC releases.
Yet $7,500 per song, sans royalties, does feel very low.
With the assumption that the next GTA game will have the same number of licsened songs as in GTA V (Wikipedia says it’s now at 441 songs), that would mean around $3.3 million USD of the development budget would go to building the soundtrack list, which is also a small slice of pie considering big-budget blockbuster AAA games now costs hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.
It’s possible that there are different deals for different songs and bands, but seeing one (disgruntled) band pulling the curtain a bit behind the secretive development of GTA VI sure is intriguing.
Heaven 17 previously featured in GTA: Vice City Stories for its song Penthouse and Pavement.
Their song Temptation will not be featured in GTA VI, but you can listen to this synthpop bop here.
GTA VI has no firm release date but is expected to be out in 2025 for PS5 and Xbox Series.