GTA IV: Not the ‘Beginning of the End’

Over on Kotaku, Leigh Alexander links to a piece by Second Life chronicler Wagner James Au in which he posits that the release of Grand Theft Auto IV is the “beginning of the end” for big-budget next-gen gaming.

I disagree. Yes, I’ve been saying for a long time that the false promises of next-gen were bound in time to fall apart at the seams, but I don’t see Grand Theft Auto IV’s performance as anything but a success. Au points out that GTA IV’s sales after two months are only half of San Andreas‘ totals (he uses VG Chartz numbers as a reference, but they’re largely in line with the truth in this case since GTA sales data are publicly available), but fails to even consider that GTA IV sales will likely get massive boosts during the holiday season and after they drop to budget-level pricing, both of which San Andreas has already enjoyed.

But even Au’s larger point — that because Grand Theft Auto IV failed to move Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles, the market for said consoles has dried up — is flawed. The lesson we should take from GTA IV’s failure to get hardware off the shelf is not that no more hardware will ever sell, it’s that the power of a new game to sell systems absolutely pales in comparison to regular old price drops.

Of course, since Microsoft and Sony are still both losing money hand over fist on their hardware sales, they can’t quite afford to slash prices yet. So they remain stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hi-def gaming continues to stall, but the problem isn’t nearly as fundamental as Au seems to believe.

Why GTA IV Was the Beginning of the End [GigaOM, via Kotaku]

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[Source: Wired: Game|Life]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 8:19 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.