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On a call with investors today, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick pushed back on the idea that PC players have a different relationship with the Grand Theft Auto series than console players.
“Your PC players seem to engage with GTA a bit differently than console,” said Oppenheimer & Co analyst Martin Yang during a Q&A session. “There are roleplay options. Over time, do you think you want to close the player experience gap between console and PC, or do you view the two platforms as more independent because of their respective technical capabilities?”
Zelnick responded with acknowledgement that series like Civilization started on PC and expanded onto consoles, but said that “generally speaking, the experiences on console and PC tend to be roughly the same” and that, in general, “the capabilities of the PC platform today aren’t different materially from console capabilities.”
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The vanilla GTA Online experience may be roughly equivalent for console and PC players, but the console versions don’t have the mods that have helped keep GTA 5 relevant for 13 years. Take-Two of course knows that: It acquired the FiveM GTA 5 multiplayer mod behind so many RP servers.
Answering a related question about console jailbreaking, modding, and monetization opportunities, Zelnick said later that “the FiveM business is a profitable business,” but then turned back to one of his stock lines.
“The mission of this company is to create the best entertainment on earth and bring it to consumers around the world,” said the Take-Two CEO. “If we do that right, the monetization takes care of itself.”
Take-Two has consistently declined to reveal anything about its plans for GTA 6 on PC or the future of GTA Online, and I didn’t have high hopes that it would change tack with the console launch just over a week away, but props to the savvy investment analysts who asked about the topics anyway.
As I think the questioner from Oppenheimer was getting at, it’s sensible to wonder whether the custom servers and roleplaying features made popular by GTA 5 modders and streamers on PC will come stock in the next GTA Online iteration, including on consoles. Zelnick didn’t sound particularly enthused about modding in his responses today—he said that Take-Two “isn’t religious on the topic”—but I’m not reading much into it.
For now, Grand Theft Auto 6 is launching on November 19 as a singleplayer-only console game, with no PC release date announced, and no known plans to launch a new version of GTA Online set in Vice City and its surroundings, though we expect both of those things to happen eventually.