grand theft auto 4...Is a success or a failure???

[Ail]

famousringo said:

I think this graph does a good job of illustrating it:

http://vgchartz.com/swlaunch.php?reg1=All&game1=Grand+Theft+Auto%3A+San+Andreas+-+PS2&reg2=All&game2=Grand+Theft+Auto+IV+-+PS3&reg3=All&game3=Grand+Theft+Auto+IV+-+X360&weeks=100

GTA IV on PS3 and X360 fall about 1 million short of where GTA:SA was on the PS2 at a similar point in its life. The charts look similar, except the two million units GTA:SA sold on Xbox are not shown here.

Yes, GTA IV is not quite living up to its predecessor in sales, but to me the bigger difference is that GTA:SA didn't cost $100 million to make. The series has peaked, and I don't expect investments in future GTAs to be nearly as large.

I don't think investment in the serie will go down.

You have to realize that as gaming matures the time of medium investment games that return HUGE amount of money is slowly fading away.

It is still a huge commercial success that is generating a lot of profits...

It's the same with the movie business, the more sequels you do the more they end up costing and usually return less but they are still very profitable.

The other thing is that investing 100 million$ in a GTA game is a no brainer, from the publisher's point of view the risk is still very minimum compared to trying to launch a new IP...

As for comparing with the PS2, you are not comparing similar install base. Fact is GTA4 attach rate is actually superior to the one the last GTA game had on the PS2...