At a presentation at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference last week, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that he believed cross-platform play is an inevitability, especially when it comes to PC.
“The closed system walls are coming down,” he told the audience. Zelnick is taking a multi-track mentality to the idea, thinking that cross-platform involves being primarily device agnostic. “Microsoft is basically already there,” referring to the platform holder’s stated policy to put games on both Xbox One and PC.
The next step, Zelnick thinks, will be streaming to different devices.
“Streaming is going to accelerate those walls coming down,” Zelnick said. “We’re all here for the consumers. If you’re going to create rules that don’t benefit the consumers but somehow you think benefit your enterprise, you’re mistaken. Consumers will go elsewhere. You have to pay attention to what the consumer wants.”
Unlike a lot of other heads of the game industry, though, Zelnick does not seem to believe streaming is the end-all, be-all. While Microsoft appears to be working on a streaming solution for the next Xbox, they are also reportedly working on a local variation, too. Zelnick thinks that audience of people who don’t want to stream their games from external hardware will need to be served, as well.
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