Technology

Google Makes Four Predictions About Black Friday Shoppers

Published

7 years ago

November 24, 2016

Jeff Desjardins

Google Makes Four Predictions About Black Friday Shoppers

Thanksgiving weekend is here, and it kickstarts a holiday shopping season in which consumers are expected to spend a hefty $655.8 billion.

And while massive amounts of store foot traffic is nothing new, the way consumers search and shop on their mobile devices is a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, 76% of people who search for nearby products on their smartphones end up visiting brick-and-mortar businesses within a day.

The folks at Think With Google have crunched the numbers to see if there is any interesting correlations between mobile searches and location data. Their findings are below, and it may be interesting to compare their predictions to your own family’s activities this weekend.

Google’s Predictions

1. Even though foot traffic peaks at 6pm on Thanksgiving day to kick off early Black Friday deals, the shopping actually starts much earlier. Mobile searches happen throughout the day for deals, and 59% of them happen before stores even open.

2. On Black Friday itself, foot traffic peaks between 12pm and 4pm, but mobile searches remain very constant throughout the day. Peak time for mobile searches is at 8pm, which seems a little counterintuitive.

3. New Englanders are the most hardcore Black Friday shoppers. By 10am on Black Friday, more than one-quarter of New England shoppers have already visited a store. The rest of the country lags behind by about an hour.

4. Women buy early and often, and men wait until the last minute. During the whole holiday season, women buy twice as much as men. It’s only the week before Christmas that men are more likely to complete holiday purchases.

Related Topics:google retail black friday shoppers thanksgiving

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Technology

Charting Grand Theft Auto: GTA’s Budget and Revenues

Dive into the GTA budget through the years, with GTA VI set to be the most expensive video game of all time.

Published

1 day ago

December 5, 2023

Marcus Lu

A cropped chart comparing the GTA budget and revenue across three game titles.

Charting Grand Theft Auto: GTA’s Budget and Revenues

Over 10 years since the launch of Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V), the second most-sold video game in history, Rockstar Games has announced its sequel GTA VI will be “coming 2025.”

As the anticipation only grows for this next big entry in the franchise, we take a look at the GTA budget through the years. How much have the last two games cost to make, how much have they earned, and how do they compare with the latest entry?

Data for this visualization comes from Statista, TweakTown, and Twitch Metrics.

How Much Has GTA VI Cost to Make?

The GTA franchise has grown enormously in scale from humble beginnings as a top-down, 2D video game in 1997. Fifteen installments later, the upcoming release, GTA VI, is estimated to be the most expensive video game to be made yet.

Here’s a look at how much GTA VI and the last two major releases cost, and how much revenue they’ve earned as of August 2023.

Year	Title	Production Costs ($)	Revenue ($)	Copies Sold
2025 (est.)	GTA VI	$2B (rumored)	N/A	N/A
2013	GTA V	$265M	$7.7B	185M
2008	GTA IV	$100M	$2B	25M

In 2008, GTA IV cost around $100 million—already a budget that rivalled big Hollywood releases. However with 25 million copies sold, the game earned nearly $2 billion—a five-fold return on its production cost.

Five years later, GTA V (2013) cost more than $200 million to make—twice GTA IV’s budget. A decade after its release, GTA V has generated close to $8 billion, with hundreds of millions in annual revenue from subscriptions and in-game purchases—a model that its successor is sure to follow.

In fact, subscription fees and in-game purchases represented 78% of Take-Two Interactive’s (parent of GTA developer Rockstar Games) revenues in 2023.

Analysts estimate the to-be-released GTA VI’s costs at $2 billion, including marketing and other expenses. A massive open-world (set in the Miami-inspired “Vice City”), cutting edge graphics, and a reportedly brand-new game engine are all reasons for the game’s outsized budget.

For comparison, the current most expensive games to have been made include Red Dead Redemption 2 (also by Rockstar) and Star Citizen, both reportedly with a $500 million budget.

Meanwhile, Take-Two Interactive shares are up more than 50% for the year.