andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk)
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Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick said in a recent interview with IGN that PC has become a “much more” important part of the gaming ecosphere than it was in the past—one that generates a significant portion of sales for multiplatform games. And if you think that means he’s ready to commit to a PC version of Grand Theft Auto 6 anytime soon, well, you’d best think again.
“So with Civ 7 it’s available on console and PC and Switch right away,” Zelnick said, referring to the recently released Sid Meier’s Civilization 7, published by Take-Two’s 2K Games division. “With regard to others in our lineup, we don’t always go across all platforms simultaneously. Historically, Rockstar has started with some platforms and then historically moved to other platforms.”
That is undeniably true. Starting with Grand Theft Auto 3 nearly 25 years ago, Rockstar has made us wait anywhere from seven months to 14 years for their games to slowly amble from console to PC. There’s no technical reason for the persistent delays, no, but as PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield speculated, there is one explanation that makes sense: GTA 6 is going to make serious bank on consoles, and by holding off on a PC release Take-Two can enjoy a second revenue bump—”a little afterburner of profit,” as Ted put it—probably driven in part by people who end up buying the game twice because they want to play it on PC but couldn’t bring themselves to wait.
“We have seen PC become a much more and more important part of what used to be a console business, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that trend continue,” Zelnick said, and you might think that means putting GTA 6 on PC would be more of a priority for Take-Two than it’s been in the past. But, he continued, “Of course, there will be a new console generation.”
“When you have a big title in the market and we have many of them coming, historically that has sold consoles,” Zelnick said.
“And I think that will happen this year. I don’t think tariffs are going to be our friend, but I think there will be a meaningful uptick in console sales in calendar 25 because of the release schedule, not just coming from us, but coming from others. So I’m not concerned about [console sales falling]. I think the trend that you’d want to focus on is this increasing share of the market that is reflected in PC.”
Pessimistically, you might read that as a hint that a PC version of GTA 6 will be held back for the next console generation, PlayStation 6 and Xbox Series whatever. That would afford Rockstar the opportunity to release an “enhanced” version of the game for the new generation of consoles and drop that edition on PC, giving impatient PC gamers an excuse to spring for the new hotness on the platform they really wanted to play it on in the first place. That’s how it worked out with GTA 5, though that game arrived at the tail end of its console generation, releasing on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in the fall of 2013 just two months before the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launched. Next-gen ports of the game showed up a year later, and it took almost another six months, until April 2015, for the PC release.
Look, we know Grand Theft Auto 6 will come to PC at some point—no way is Take-Two going to leave that much money on the table. The only question is when. I may be reading too much into this, but I also can’t help wondering if perhaps our hopes for GTA 6 in ’26 might be a little overly optimistic, too.