Games · Answer

How much do games publishers spend on advertising?

Take-Two reported $1.29bn on $6.66bn of revenue for the fiscal year to March 2026, an intensity of 19.34%. That is roughly six times the median across three unrelated industries, which sat at 2.01%, 3.22% and 3.30%. But the spread inside every category measured was so wide that the category tells you almost nothing about any individual company — so benchmark against business model, not against peers.

The evidence

The series, from the company's own filings.

Advertising expense of $241.1m, $297.3m, $1,212.5m, $1,132.4m, $1,253.9m and $1,287.1m for the fiscal years ending March 2021 through March 2026, on revenue rising from $3.37bn to $6.66bn. Intensity: 7.15%, 8.48%, 22.66%, 21.17%, 22.26%, 19.34%.

The step change is one year, and it is probably an acquisition.

Spending stepped up 4.08 times in the fiscal year to March 2023 and has been flat to falling since. The Zynga acquisition closed in May 2022, inside that year, and Zynga's model is paid user acquisition. This is a hypothesis: the filing has not been read, and it is labeled as such wherever it appears.

The category benchmark is noise.

Across 1,633 US filers tagging advertising expense for calendar 2024, the within-category coefficient of variation was 2.21 for prepackaged software, 1.51 for business services and 1.49 for pharmaceuticals after outlier treatment. A band that wide does not predict any individual company.

The medians are nearly identical across unrelated industries.

2.01%, 3.22% and 3.30% for enterprise software, drug development and business services. The typical company spends about the same share of revenue on advertising whatever it does, which makes the category simultaneously useless and unnecessary as a benchmark.

What would have to be true for this to be wrong

If your business acquires customers primarily through paid media — a live-service title, a mobile free-to-play portfolio, a direct-to-consumer storefront — then a double-digit intensity is a model choice rather than an overspend, and comparing yourself to a premium-release publisher will mislead you in both directions. Classify by how a customer arrives before you compare a number.

SEC XBRL companyconcept and frames at data.sec.gov, AdvertisingExpense against Revenues and RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax, read October 24, 2026. Every row validated against the filer's own concept history; 12 of 250 rejected for material conflicts or name mismatch, and the rejections are published.
Every row behind this answer is published in the standing study at cultmath.com/research/marketing/advertising-intensity, which is re-run on a schedule and corrected in place, dated. Context for this answer is in the companion study at cultmath.com/research/games/gta.
Published 2026-10-25 by Ipalibo Da-Wariboko, CULT+MATH LLC. Where a number could not be sourced, this page says so and gives none.

This is one of six decisions covered in the games decision brief — each with the evidence behind it, who owns it, who it is contested with, and what would have to be true for the answer to flip.

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