Business Insider published a long-form profile of Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick on May 5, 2026. The piece covered a number of subjects — AI tooling at the company, GTA 6 marketing strategy, the broader publishing business — but one specific passage about the company’s 2023 acquisition of Cfx.re drew the most attention from the gaming press.
What Zelnick Actually Said
Asked about the rationale for buying the team behind FiveM and RedM, Zelnick framed the deal as a join-them-rather-than-fight-them play. He noted that hundreds of thousands of players were already engaging with GTA through the FiveM platform, and the business question was whether to treat that as a threat to Take-Two’s IP or as an existing audience worth meeting where they already were. The company chose the second option.
Why It Matters
The acquisition cost has been reported around $20 million, though Take-Two has not publicly confirmed the figure. The strategic shift it represents matters more than the price tag. Rockstar spent years sending takedown notices to ambitious GTA mods. Acquiring Cfx.re reversed that posture — the same modding infrastructure that the company once treated as legal exposure is now an internal asset Rockstar can deploy for GTA 6’s launch and post-launch lifecycle.
What the Reporting Added
Coverage from GTA Boom and other outlets connected Zelnick’s comments to two other recent moves: the January 2026 launch of the Cfx Marketplace (a curated storefront for modding assets) and the earlier shutdown of alt:V, FiveM’s main competing framework. Together, the three pieces look like deliberate groundwork for whatever modding system eventually ships for GTA 6. Neither Take-Two nor Rockstar has confirmed when official GTA 6 modding support will arrive, but the structural pieces are now in place.
Open Questions
Several things remain genuinely unknown. Whether GTA 6 will launch with any official modding support, or whether that capability will arrive months or even a year after launch. Whether existing FiveM server operators will be able to port their setups to GTA 6 or whether they’ll need to rebuild from scratch on whatever framework Rockstar deploys. And whether the Cfx Marketplace’s revenue-share and content-moderation terms will be tightened in the GTA 6 era. Zelnick’s Business Insider comments don’t answer any of these questions directly, but they make the strategic direction unambiguous: modding is going to be governed by Rockstar, not by an independent community framework.
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