Grand Theft Auto VI is coming this year to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, but it won’t be on PC at launch, at least based on what Rockstar Games and parent company Take-Two have said thus far. So why isn’t GTA 6 coming to PC at launch? There is no clear answer, but Take-Two executive Strauss Zelnick has shed a little more light on the situation, saying Take-Two doesn’t have a mandate for all of its games to “go across all platforms simultaneously.”
However, Zelnick admitted to IGN, “Historically, Rockstar has started with some platforms and then historically moved to other platforms.” Reading between the lines here, it sure sounds like GTA 6 will come to PC at a later date, which would be in keeping with tradition for the company. Its last two big games, Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption II, launched on console first before coming to PC.
GTA 6 (Grand Theft Auto VI) Official Trailer
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Zelnick said a PC version of a multiplatform game can eventually make up 40% of a game’s total sales mix, so there is no doubt a big business reason to bring GTA 6 to PC, at least eventually.
“We have seen PC become a much more and more important part of what used to be a console business, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that trend continue,” he said.
Back in November, Zelnick said PC will continue to be “more and more important” for Take-Two’s business going forward, saying that supporting PC “isn’t complicated for us.”
So why isn’t GTA 6 coming to PC at launch? No one is saying why. But a former Rockstar developer said the studio aims to “prioritize what sells.”
“The PC version is kind of the version that’s in the background, that is running the two versions and building them,” former Rockstar developer Mike York said. “There’s always a PC version of the game, but it’s not polished and it’s just kind of feeding the other games and making them work.”
For Take-Two’s latest quarter, revenue from PC and “other” game sales reached $120.3 million, or 9% of Take-Two’s total platform revenue. This compares to $731.6 million (54%) for mobile and $507.9 million (37%) for console. Of course, these figures fluctuate based on game launches, but for the latest quarter, PC revenue was the smallest overall for Take-Two. Mobile is so big for Take-Two because it owns the mobile juggernaut Zynga. The $12.7 billion that Take-Two paid for Zynga represents the second-largest acquisition in history for video games, only behind Microsoft’s blockbuster buyout of Activision Blizzard.