Aaaand downvotes from people who never read the article, we’ve reached peak reddit.

This is from an earnings call. He 1) says that increasing hardware prices are not a good thing and 2) thinks streaming is starting to be ready enough that people who can’t afford gaming PCs or consoles, can stream the games instead.

This came from a lengthy answer given in Take-Two’s quarterly earnings call this morning by Strauss Zelnick, in response to a question about the rising cost of hardware. He began his reply by saying that the rising price of hardware is “not a good thing” because it means fewer people will have machines on which to play games, but that it won’t slow Take-Two down as a business, “because we’re delivering experiences that people want.”

But Zelnick continued with a really interesting response about streaming. First, he pointed out that the world is increasingly moving to open systems, as demonstrated by the rise of PC gaming over the last 20 years. Then, he continued:

With the advent of streaming—which we really do believe is 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. So, without regard to what happens in the console business, which is of consequence to us, of course, we see the overall install base as a practical matter growing materially. And if you believe in streaming, 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 in three years, and by commercial I mean low latency. That can 10x the effective the install base. That doesn’t mean we’re going to 10x our revenue, and we wouldn’t project that we would, because obviously your avid consumers already have access to video game machines. But I do think it creates great opportunity for titles that are broadly desirable even outside of core markets, and we do have titles like that, obviously.

This is VERY different from what the headline suggests, of course Kotaku editorialized the fuck out of it.

If people who lack a gaming machine have a big internet connection instead is rather questionable.