Take Two explains poor Grand Theft Auto IV DLC and retail sales

[Reasonable]

I think they were judged as 'poor' by Take Two judging by the investor call comments. Perhaps they thought the attach rate would be much higher and factored that into their financials.

I see this two ways:

1 - the DLC may have performed fine and it just makes a handy scapegoat for their overall poor performance

2 - the DLC did perform below what they needed and while the unit sales seem fine to us (assuming the over 1M for LAD is accurate) from a corporate point of view the sales were nonetheless not enough for the investment.

I've always wondered at the cost here, and what the terms were. I mean, Uncharted 2 cost $20 million to make, I believe Halo 3 was roughly the same, how did two DLC episodes cost $50 M to fund? Or was the $50 M covering development plus marketing, etc? I just never understood the $50 M in the first place - it always seemed high for DLC.

Guess in the end what this means is that their expectation for what DLC for GTAIV could do was unreasonable vs the general market for DLC.