According to Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick mid-gen console upgrades, which also includes the rumored PS5 Pro model, aren’t that important.
That’s what the executive told IGN ahead of the release of Take-Two’s most recent financial results for the first quarter of its current fiscal year. As outed by Zelnick, it all depends on what this mid-gen refreshment includes, but in general, these upgrades aren’t all that meaningful and don’t change much.
It “all depends on what that mid-generation upgrade would look like”, the Take-Two CEO told IGN. “Generally speaking, the mid-generation upgrades haven’t really changed much”. Zelnick added that mig-gen console upgrades “aren’t all that meaningful.”
Interestingly, although Zelnick doesn’t see these upgrades as too meaningful, some months ago he did say that he believes that both Microsoft and Sony will be releasing upgrades in the near future. “We probably will,” he said back in May of this year in a pre-briefing call. He added, “They did not affect the business very much.”
Recent rumors suggest that Sony plans to release a new PS5 model, possibly a Pro model, sometime next year. Meanwhile, as covered recently, Microsoft appears to be considering the Xbox Series X as its mid-gen refresh model – the Xbox Series S is being considered as Microsoft’s standard Xbox machine.
During the last-gen console cycle, both Microsoft and Sony released mid-gen upgrades in the form of the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X with the latter being considered the more powerful of the two. It remains to be seen if we’ll see upgrades of the PS5 and Xbox Series at some point, but apparently, Microsoft is, at least, looking into releasing a digital-only Series X model. In addition, the company is said to planning other hardware for 2025 – five years after the launch of the Series X and Series S. Here’s what we wrote about Microsoft’s Series X in our launch review:
“Microsoft’s next generation console, in addition to being its most powerful machine designed to date, is a celebration of two decades of Xbox gaming with nearly full support for the history of Xbox and support for what could be a robust future of gaming, although the potential for the Xbox Series X has yet to be fully realized”, we wrote in 2020.
