In a recent investor centered Q&A that took place after the release of the company’s latest financial report, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked on the future state of the industry which is currently seeing skyrocketing prices due to memory and storage shortages, also resulting in both Sony and Microsoft raising the prices of their consoles considerably. And while the Take-Two boss admitted that the rising prices for hardware is detrimental to the overall industry at large, he believes that video game streaming will be one of the potent ways to handle the issue, in the long term.
And while Streaming has been around for a while, it still offers a less-than-ideal experience in most cases, with issues in latency, responsiveness and other technical problems. However, Zelnick believes higher quality streaming will be just “around the corner,” and could solve the current issues of rising costs of hardware.
“With the advent of streaming, which we really do believe is around the corner in terms of having something with slow latency and really works well for consumers, machines that weren’t game machines before will become game machines,” Zelnick said.
“So without regard to what happens in the console business, which is a consequence to us of course, we see the overall installed base as a practical matter growing materially. And if you believe in streaming — and to be clear, we really do — and I’m happy to put a timeline on it: I think we’ll be in commercial streaming mode within three years. And by commercial, I mean low latency. That can 10x the effective install base.
“Now it doesn’t mean we’re going to 10x our revenue, and we wouldn’t project that we would, but because obviously your avid consumers already have access to video game machines. But I do think it creates great opportunity for titles that are broadly desirable even outside of core markets. And we do have titles like that obviously.”
What do you think about Take-Two CEO’s views on streaming as a viable solution to the ongoing component crisis in the industry? Sound off in the comments below.
