"Both we and [Xbox-maker] Microsoft believe there was a big market for GTA IV episodic content," company CEO Ben Feder said during a call with investors on Thursday. "And some factors have affected their performance. Both were released significantly after the core unit … GTA IV, which was launched in April of 2008 and therefore weren't able to leverage GTA IV's initial marketing campaign and initial launch fervor."

The Rockstar-developed episodes, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, were released in February and October of 2009, respectively. Each cost 1600 points, or $20, at launch, and each included single-player campaigns that lasted more than a dozen hours, along with multiplayer and side content.

Take-Two and Rockstar also released the episodes in October on a standalone disc entitled Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City. Sales figures have not been publicly announced for the Xbox-only disc, though Wedbush Morgan Securities analysts Michael Pachter recently pegged the sales for the disc in its first month on the market at around 100,000 units in the U.S., a far cry from the millions of copies sold of GTA IV.

"Episodes From Liberty City seems to have been most appealing to those who have finished GTA IV and wanted more story and gameplay," Feder said. "Which is a smaller market than initially expected.
Despite the dour analysis, Feder did praise the episodes' critical acclaim and said they were "profitable contributors to the company, so we're pleased with them."

He said he thinks the episodes will do fine long-term. "There's very little precedent for this type of episodic content at the price point that we offered it. And so we're confident that these titles will continue to have a long life, just as we've seen a long life from all of our other prior GTA releases."

The ad, apparently for a fake movie, declares "Liberty City, It's Over!" implying, naturally, that we're all done here. "Next stop," it says, and that portion appears to be torn out, except for the word "Seagull." I think it looks like the name of a hotel, but who knows.

To the left of that is "Opens March Everywhere," and your guess is as good as mine as to what that means. But Rockstar knows what it's doing here, it's getting people to talk, and we've taken the bait.

(A picture of the entire "ad" is at the link below.)

Liberty City, It's over! Next stop? [GTA4.Net via VG247]

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People said to me that GTA was just like Pac-Man — he eats the dots, while you drive over the dots in GTA. The police chase you like the ghosts in Pac-Man.

Know what's missing from Pac-Man? Hookers. Radio stations, too. And guns.

David Jones: "GTA Same As Pac Man" [NowGamer] [Pic]

I've now checked the completion stats online for Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars three times: in mid-April, mid-May and mid-June. These stats are listed on the Rockstar Social Club website. They don't represent a GTA:CW player's mere completion of the acclaimed DS games' story. They indicate that a player has unlocked the game's Guardian Lions statues, which means they have finished the game's story and synced their DS to Rockstar's site twice.

The game was released in mid-March and less than a month later, 1,900 people had done all of that. A month later, that number was at 4,500. Today, a little over a month since I last checked, the figure is at 5,893. (Check the GTA: Chinatown Wars stats yourself, registration required.)

Some might draw a correlation between the completion stats and the sales of Chinatown Wars. I won't, because there's no telling what the norm is for someone both buying a game and then going to the lengths required to get listed on Rockstar's site.

But this is still a figure we can track, to gauge how much interest the game holds for players and how many more make it to the finish line worldwide, each month. It's easy to lose sight of the life a game has beyond its release. Here we have a sign of activity we can keep checking until Rockstar turns their feature off.

While the mods are nothing new (they're for the ageing San Andreas, first released on PC in 2005), the Police in question seem to have only just gotten around to noticing. And noticing that their cars (and in some cases officers) are being replicated for use in video game killing sprees.

Don Gotthardt, from the Fairfax County Police Department, says "The Fairfax County Police Department finds the videos in very poor taste. One of the reasons we find it in poor taste is because of the way the officers are depicted."

Fairfax County cops have contacted YouTube and requested that videos showcasing the mods be removed.

Grand Theft Police Logos [NBC, via GamePolitics]

Jimmy Fallon promised more game-related stuff on the Late Night show, and in this interview with Hollywood legend Ray Liotta, Jimmy Fallon delivers.

Given the chance to ask the man about his enormous body of work in the movie business, Fallon instead goes all gushy and bugs Liotta about his voice work as Tommy Vercetti in Grant Theft Auto: Vice City.

Which, it turns out, he's never played.

Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg let slip the information in an interview with GameDaily - in which he calls the Grand Theft Auto IV expansion "the most successful game addon content we've ever launched" - saying "If that content was sold at retail, it would be one of the best sellers across all platforms. It would have outsold Killzone 2".

Interesting. Not for the "outsold" argument (which is hardly fair, since L&D was out for half of February while Killzone 2 was only out for a few days), but for the Lost & Damned sales ballpark. Nice to get one for a downloadable game, even if it still leaves us wondering...

Microsoft's Greenberg: 'PS3 Business' Is 'Hemorrhaging At Retail' [Gamasutra]

This shirt ("American Dream") is by label Gatsby. It could be more subtle, yes, but it does get the point across. Plus, they get bonus points for not only managing to barely escape copyright infringement claims from Rockstar, but from Wu-Tang as well.

You can get "American Dream" from Digital Gravel at the link below, it's going for $31.

'American Dream' t-shirt by Gatsby [Digital Gravel]

You may remember in December 2008, Rockstar's top talent (including Sam & Dan Houser, Leslie Benzies and "several other key members of the creative team") signed a deal with publishers Take-Two that would see them continue releasing games together until 2012. In return for their games, Rockstar would receive a cut of the profits. And that cut looks like a sizeable one.

It was today disclosed that Rockstar's best and brightest were to receive 2,849,003 shares in Take-Two (pending shareholder approval next month). That translates to around, oh, $18 million worth of stock. Which is a lot, but remember: this is only March 2009. Meaning this is only the start.

Speaking with MTV, Sony's John Koller - who's just everywhere these days - says that with the DS fan base being (as he sees it) made up mostly of kids under the age of 12, it's a strange fit for the system.

"It's an interesting launch on DS," he said. "It raises some eyebrows in a lot of areas. It'll be interesting to see how that sells." It will! Especially when you consider that there are millions upon untold millions of DS owners over the age of 12!

Sony Talking To Rockstar About More ‘GTA' PSP Games [MTV]

The listing in question was spotted on the website of British retailer HMV. As you can see right here, it says "Grand Theft Auto (Gta): San Andreas Stories", and there's a tiny picture of some box art for the game.

But look closely at the box art. It's recycling art from the cover of the original San Andreas, something Rockstar never do when it comes to the handheld versions of their GTA game worlds. And if you're still not convinced that makes the listing bogus, click the little tab on the website that takes you to "description".

There you'll see the listing was in fact created in HMV's system in 2007. And you'll also see HMV's staff writing:

With San Andreas the only city in the GTA universe yet receive the Stories treatment, we wouldn't be surprised if Rockstar eventually end up bringing out 'San Andreas Stories' on PSP and/or PS2. There's no word from the developers about the game at this stage, but if you sign up by clicking the above link, we'll get in touch with you the second that the game is available to pre-order. If it ever does come out, that is.

Doesn't mean a San Andreas PSP game won't ever come out, just...this isn't it. Not this, not now. Nothing to see here, people, move along, move along!

action / adventure games coming soon [HMV]

That's not to say that it's not. It, and everything else created on Earth, is. But it's an easy target. No, Barrera thinks Lost & Damned is better than, well, almost everything:

Stuff just ends up being so generic these days.

We want to have something that stands up to all mediums. If you put The Lost and Damned as a movie script, man, it would be crazy, and we want gamers to realise that.

There's a lot of super people working on this, and the quality and calibre of their work I think exceeds what's out there in all other mainstream media.

Bit of a stretch there, Jeronimo, but we concede, your basic point is correct: Lost & Damned is OK, and definitely an improvement over GTAIV, where all but your early encounters with the games more colourful characters were as dull as the city's weather.

Show #309 : GTA IV The Lost and Damned (Part 2) [Microsoft]

Because Amazon has been dumped as the soundtrack provider for upcoming GTAIV expansion Lost & The Damned, in favour of Apple's iTunes. Seems a big part of the original deal with Amazon was down to the fact they offered songs for sale without any prohibitive DRM (digital rights management), something iTunes couldn't bring to the table.

Now, though, nearly a year later, iTunes does offer DRM-free music. And with iTunes being bigger than every other online music store combined (and then some), making the switch must have been an easy decision for Rockstar to make.

So what's this mean for you, Joe Consumer? It means that, should you take a shine to any of The Lost & The Damned's musical offerings, you'll be able to buy them from a store you may actually use, and may actually be familiar with.

Rockstar switching GTA IV music partnership from Amazon to iTunes [Variety]

Did I say reminiscent? It's really closer to a copycat. I haven't really played it enough yet to write up a formal review, but the game does seem to have some interesting things going for it.

You play by tilting the device around and then holding a virtual forward or back button. There's also a button to attack, another to enter a vehicle and a third that lets you switch between weapons.

It's pretty fun to mess around with, but doesn't seem to have the cohesion of a genuine GTA title, it's also most certainly missing the macabre humor that makes the original title so much fun to play. For instance, you get points for killing people, blowing things up, stealing vehicles, but there's not a whole lot to tip you off that it's an absurdists adventure. Like getting extra points for mowing down a weaving line of Hare Krishnas.

The extensive music catalog, sizable city and sandbox setting might still make the game's $7 worthwhile. Stay tuned for our full review down the line.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Didn't Grand Theft Auto IV just ship? Well, if Game Informer's "Loose Talk" is correct, pegging the next full-fledged GTA for, say, November 2009, it would put it about 18 months after the ship date of GTA IV.

Since Vice City shipped almost exactly a year after Grand Theft Auto III, however, makes the prospect seem less ludicrous.

Rockstar Games still has two downloadable episodes to ship this year, including The Lost and The Damned, which hits in February and another that remains undated.

Could they do it? We're not updating our Amazon wish lists just yet, but we're also not ruling it out. Take-Two and Rockstar do like money, after all. But we're checking in with them soon to find out how feasible a fourth quarter release could be.

Rumor: Rockstar ready to release next GTA by end of 09 [PSU]