I've been around long enough to remember a time when "PC gaming is dying" was something people said without irony: A declaration that the convenience and power of consoles would soon put an end to the headaches and expense of playing games on PC. It didn't work out that way, of course, and these days it seems like the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction: PC gaming is thriving, and the walled-garden approach of conventional consoles is increasingly being called into question.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick expressed just that feeling in a new interview with Squawk Box on CNBC. "I think it's moving towards PC and business is moving towards open rather than closed," Zelnick said. "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's qualifying comment hints at the state of flux the game industry currently finds itself in. Microsoft insists that it's making a new next-gen Xbox console, but it also wants us to know that everything is an Xbox now, which might lead one to wonder, as PC Gamer hardware hammer James Bentley did, what the point is of buying a new Xbox.
Valve, meanwhile, complicated matters even further with last week's announcement of the new Steam Machine, a small, connect-it-to-your-TV box that walks, swims, and quacks like a console, but is in reality a low-spec gaming PC. That reveal prompted Xbox boss Phil Spencer to remind us all, seemingly without much excitement behind it, that Xbox is "one of the largest publishers on Steam," and that doesn't seem great for Microsoft's console business: After all, if you can play Xbox games on your Steam machine, and you can't play Steam games on your Xbox console, why would you buy an Xbox console? Much of that decision will come down to pricing and we still don't have those numbers on the Steam Machine yet, but even at this stage it's something that people are no doubt thinking about.
So I find myself agreeing with Zelnick—console gaming is here to stay, even if consoles aren't—but I would be remiss if I didn't note the little irony: Grand Theft Auto 6, far and away the biggest gun in Take-Two's arsenal, still hasn't been announced for PC.
