Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick is optimistic about Stadia, though he notes that how the platform will fare with players remains to be seen.
Speaking during a call with investors this week, Zelnick discussed the coming cloud-based game platform in a Q&A, sharing insight into the company’s conversations with Google, and its overall opinion of Stadia in the process.
In short: “We are supportive of Stadia. We feel really good about that release,” says Zelnick.
Notably, he stands in support of Stadia’s traditional business model. While the platform will support programs like Ubisoft’s Uplay+ that offer access to a subscriber-only game library, titles on the platform will be purchased for full price, as they would be on any physical game console.
“We’ve always said that you want to distinguish a distribution technology from a business model, the business model that we’re using is one that’s tried and true, which is downloading or streaming for sale,” says Zelnick.
On the technical front, he echos comments from Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot and says that bringing games to the platform so far seems to be a fairly straightforward process and, on a technical front, relatively seamless. “There are some minor challenges,” notes Zelnick, “Nothing that we can’t surmount.”
One of Take-Two’s subsidiaries, 2K Games, already has a title slated for a Stadia release, and Zelnick says that Google has made it so making titles available on the platform has very little friction.
“Google has been exceedingly helpful,” says Zelnick. “We feel very good about the opportunity. It remains to be seen how the platform works. They’re awfully talented and they are very, very committed. So fingers crossed that meets and exceeds consumers expectations.”
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2019