In light of Valve’s recent announcement of the Steam Machine, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has offered his own opinions on the subject of gaming platforms. In an interview with CNBC, Zelnick mentioned his belief that gaming as a whole appears to be moving more and more towards PC as the main platform. However, despite this, he doesn’t believe that gaming consoles will stop being made.
“I think it’s moving towards PC and business is moving towards open rather than closed,” said Zelnick when asked about the subject by CNBC. “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.”
Further in the interview, Zelnick also noted that, while consoles and mobiles are currently even when it comes to the market at large, mobile as a platform has seemingly been growing at a much quicker rate than consoles have.
Interestingly, Zelnick’s beliefs fall quite well in line with what Microsoft has been doing in the gaming market at large with initiatives like Xbox Play Anywhere as well as the company’s “it’s an Xbox” ad campaign from earlier this year. CEO Satya Nadella had also spoken about this dichotomy between PC and consoles in an interview back in October.
In the interview, he brought up the fact that Microsoft had initially decided to get into the console market because it wanted to build a PC-styled gaming console. This would eventually lead to the launch of the Xbox – a console that got its name because it was being referred to internally as a DirectX Box, which would use the Windows-based DirectX graphics API but with a console form factor.
“It’s kind of funny that people thing about the console-PC as two different things,” he said. “We built the console, because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming. And so I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom.”
“But at the end of the day, console has an experience that is unparalleled. It delivers performance that’s unparalleled, that pushes I think, the system forward.”
As part of its ongoing efforts to turn Xbox into a brand rather than just a console, Microsoft also recently unveiled its new set of game development tools that would simplify the process of developing across consoles and Windows. The tools include a new GameInput API, as well as PlayFab Game Saves and the ability for developers to target AMD64 and x64 as target platforms simultaneously rather than needing to compile for each target individually.
Rumours have also indicated that Microsoft’s next-generation console might essentially end up being an Xbox-branded gaming PC that runs full-fledged Windows while also being capable of running console games.
Valve, however, ended up beating Microsoft to the finish line with its recent unveiling of the Steam Machine. Essentially a full-fledged gaming PC that runs on some semi-custom parts, the Steam Machine will run on the Arch Linux-based SteamOS, and is slated for launch in early 2026.
