The PC version of a multiplatform game can generate 40% of its overall sales—or, possibly, even more—but Take-Two still has zero desire to deliver a PC port of GTA VI when the highly anticipated action-adventure game from Rockstar Games launches for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S this fall, according to new statements that Take-Two CEO and chairman Strauss Zelnick gave to an outlet after being queried as to when the inevitable PC version of GTA VI may be released.
“So with Civ 7 it’s available on console and PC and Switch right away,” Zelnick said of Firaxis’ recently launched game before going on to explain that the holding company doesn’t treat all of its franchises the same and how some tend to get PC ports later down the road. “With regard to others in our lineup, we don’t always go across all platforms simultaneously. Historically, Rockstar has started with some platforms and then historically moved to other platforms.”
“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,” Zelnick goes on to admit, although the executive had nothing to share about when PC players would be able to play GTA VI.
“The reason why a PC port comes later and not the first thing that comes out, is because they want to prioritise what sells,” Mike York, a former Rockstar Games developer, explained in a video from 2023. “Most of the time, especially in the past, PlayStation was the big seller. PlayStation was the console to have. It sold more than any other console for the most part. Everybody’s playing PlayStation.”
“This is very important for everybody to remember: one of the main reasons why a PC port will take so long is because it’s different architecture and different components,” York added.
“They have to accommodate for all these different things that can happen. Because on a PlayStation and an Xbox, each one of those has one graphics card, and it’s the same graphics card, it’s the same architecture inside the box as every single PlayStation that’s shipped to millions of people. But when it comes to a PC, every single person has a different PC. They’re running it differently. They have different hardware in there. They have different CPUs and GPUs. The memory usage and the different things the game is doing in the background can sometimes hit a fail and mess up during different configurations. It’s hard to explain, but that’s what it boils down to.”
“They need to test the game more on PC than they would on Xbox or PlayStation. If you think about it, you already have to test the game a ton in order to get it to work. So a PC is even harder. You got to throw more resources at it. You have to test things a lot more. And when you’re doing the PC port you have to test things on multiple different hardwares, different GPUs. Not just one or two, but 10 or 20. There’s so many different configurations out there that you’ll just never be able to test them all. And there’s a lot of things that can go wrong once you release that PC port, because it just hasn’t been tested by millions of people. It’s only been tested by a thousand people at work. So you can only take it so far.”
“It seems likely PC players won’t get to play the game until 2026 at the earliest,” speculated one outlet.