During a call with investors and analysts, Strauss Zelnick, CEO at Take-Two, has expressed the opinion of the publisher of Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA V, among the others, about streaming and subscription services.
During a call with investors and analysts, Strauss Zelnick, CEO at Take-Two, has expressed the opinion of the publisher of Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA V, among the others, about streaming and subscription services.
As for streaming, the company has rather enthusiastic opinions, since it thinks that this technology will allow its games to get a broader audience, which is the position of every publisher out there.
“We’re very optimistic about the notion of streaming technology bringing our titles to consumers who currently do not have access to them. The promise of being able to sign on to service with virtually no barriers; without a box in between, and being able to play our games on any device whatsoever around the world and to do it with low-latency, well, that’s very compelling if that can be delivered,” Zelnick said.
“The folks at Google minimally have said it will be delivered, and it will be delivered in relatively short order. Conceptually, we want to be where the consumer is. We’ll support new entrants. We are a believer in streaming services. We need to have business models that make sense for us, but so far we’re pretty optimistic.”
Of course, you don’t just have Google Stadia but also PlayStation Now and Project xCloud from Microsoft on the way, so it looks like streaming will be a theme for this and the following year, and more widely for the next generation of gaming.
As for subscriptions, Zelnick is a bit less optimistic, since he thinks that gamers have limited time to play their titles, so offering them, like, 70 with one monthly fee doesn’t make much sense considering they’ll only play several of them per month.
“You have to find that intersection in business models that serve the customer successfully and also serve everyone else who participates in the value chain. And that may prove to be a little challenging for subscriptions in this space because people do consume video games differently than they consume linear entertainment,” he said.
“In the case of video games, it is possible that the average user in those 45 hours might be playing 1, 2, maybe 3 titles; certainly not 70 titles. In that event, if you play 1, 2, or 3 titles and you play them for months in a row–which often happens in [the video game world]–, then a subscription model may not be such a great deal for the customer.”
Microsoft is running Xbox Game Pass with a lot of satisfaction, to be honest, with rumors pointing at 9.5 million subscribers active per month, so it looks like the market is going in a different direction. Anyway, I get the point of what Zelnick says, and perhaps lowering prices or offering more and different tiers could be a solution to fix that ‘quantity’ problem.
