Take-Two CEO says he expects the games industry to be in ‘commercial streaming mode within 3 years,’ which is great news if you hate owning things

During Take-Two’s latest earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick said the current computing hardware crisis—you know, the one that’s making it more economical to fly roundtrip from the UK to buy an MSRP GPU at Nvidia’s QuakeCon booth than it is to buy one anywhere online—is, to quote the man directly, “not a good thing.”

But while the skyrocketing costs of consoles and components are threatening to price customers out of the pastime, Zelnick said Take-Two doesn’t see increasingly inaccessible gaming hardware as an insurmountable problem. In part, that’s because Rockstar’s parent company expects a lot more of us will be streaming games in the near future.

The “advent of streaming,” Zelnick said, is something that Take-Two believes is “right around the corner, in terms of having something that’s low latency and really works well for consumers. Machines that weren’t game machines before will become game machines.”

As a result, the company imagines its customer base will continue to grow as cloud gaming becomes standardized, regardless of what happens to the traditional gaming hardware market.

That’s “if you believe in streaming,” Zelnick said, “and to be clear, we really do. And I’m happy to put a timeline on it. I think we’ll be in commercial streaming mode within three years.”

By Zelnick’s estimate, broader adoption of cloud gaming could effectively increase Take-Two’s potential user base tenfold. That wouldn’t necessarily produce a tenfold increase in revenue, he said, as the company’s most “avid” customers are those who already have traditional gaming hardware. But game streaming “creates great opportunity for titles that are broadly desirable, even outside of core markets.”

Some amount of Zelnick’s vision of a glorious and lucrative game streaming future is believable: It’s easy to imagine that there’s a number of people out there who might, for instance, be interested in playing Take-Two games like GTA 6 even if they aren’t otherwise compelled to invest in a gaming setup—especially as the cost of building one continues to rise.

But for streaming to become a more common standard in gaming, it’ll need to overcome profound—and intensifying—anxieties about game and media ownership. From the Stop Killing Games effort to the outcry provoked by Sony’s announcing an end of disc production, there’s a justifiable unease among consumers about being left with no way to access games outside of streaming and subscription services that can be shuttered as soon as they stop generating the requisite revenue figures.

Even Hideo Kojima’s in his feelings about it, recently sharing his fears that “we will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved.” While Zelnick was bullish about digital media distribution elsewhere in this week’s earnings call, it’s worth noting that he previously went on record in 2020 as being “highly skeptical that subscriptions will be the only way or primary way that interactive entertainment is distributed.”

In time, however, we might validate the prediction of Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay, who said in 2024 that gamers would get “comfortable with not owning your game.” If the hardware cost crisis continues to worsen, we might not have a choice.