How MS failed at GTA IV.. again...

[greenmedic88]

A lot of this has to do with the way games are marketed and sold.

Each episode of Half Life 2 was about $30 separately, which is why it made better sense for Valve to do bundles (which they do for all their properties), eventually leading to the Orange Box, which took a bundle provided on Steam and put it into a retail package which expanded their reach to consumers by a huge amount (even just due to console sales alone).

That made huge sense for consumers who hadn't already bought Half Life 2 and Episode One. Even for those who had bought both, Portal and Episode Two alone would cost the same price as Orange Box if bought separately.

GTA IV is really not the same model as far as I can tell with the limited to non-existent information about these new episodes. I would expect side quest type missions or possible epilogue and prologue type missions. Of course nothing will be standalone since these are console games on hard media with the added content only being available through download.

But for $20 an episode, if that's what the final price is going to be, they will have to provide maybe 5-6 hours of play time each (seems long considering that's how long COD4 takes to finish). Keeping in mind that play time in a sandbox game is not the same as it is in a linear game because a lot of the game time is spent traveling from point A to B and visiting the same locations multiple times.

As far as horse armor type add on content, I'm pretty sure we can expect to see that for the PS3, with any luck for PS3 supporters, maybe a bit more than that in the future.