Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick shared some interesting new thoughts about the industry.
In a new interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, he said this:
I think it’s moving towards PC and business is moving towards open rather than closed.
But if you define console as the property, not the system, then the notion of a very rich game that you engage in for many hours that you play on a big screen — that’s never going away.
Zelnick also said that the business is actually somewhat even between mobile and consoles, but mobile gaming is seeing more growth.
Take-Two Is Not A Champion of PCs and Openness – But That Could Change
A lot of gamers took to use this quote as evidence that their personal support for PC gaming or openness. (As an aside, we’re using openness as the overarching concept that covers open-source software, open software, open data, etc.)
But we’re not exactly sure if they can say they are champions of PC? The Rockstar games famously get delayed on PC, about a year after Xbox and PlayStation.
But to be fair, Take-Two publishes plenty of other games cross-platform on PC and consoles at the same time, such as Civilization VII, Borderlands 4, and NBA 2K.
Obviously, Take-Two’s games have a lot of proprietary technology, and are on proprietary platforms. There are no Grand Theft Auto or NBA 2K games available to download on Linux for free, in keeping with those principles.
It looks like Zelnick’s comments are a reaction to Valve’s newly announced gaming hardware. That includes a new prebuilt gaming PC, the new Steam Machine, and a new VR headset, Steam Frame.
Valve also uses a lot of proprietary software. But they are better known for their use and support of open software.
It was Valve’s development of Proton that enabled Steam games built on Windows to run on Linux, and that’s how they created a new gaming platform in SteamOS.
We’re left guessing the context of this answer by CNBC until they share this interview for free. But it looks like they asked Zelnick about Steam Machines.
If they didn’t, it would certainly be interesting if Zelnick brought it up himself. Maybe he is considering the business opportunities in Steam Machine and Steam Frame.
OK – So Could We Be Playing Grand Theft Auto And NBA 2K On Steam Machine?
We have doubts that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be playable on Steam Machine. We can’t prove that, of course, but there’s reason to doubt it even if we lower our expectations on its minimum specs.
If the game can run on Windows on similar hardware, Valve has a different problem anyway. As we had previously explained, Take-Two uses kernel level anti-cheat on their multiplayer games, and those are incompatible with SteamOS on a fundamental level.
But if Zelnick is open to it, maybe Take-Two will come up with a solution. He may convince Valve to work with anti-cheat companies like Battleye and Denuvo to find a solution on SteamOS. Or he may switch to a new, open anti-cheat solution just for SteamOS.
These are all speculatory for now, but it’s speculation that Zelnick himself invited.
