Over at our sister site, Gamespot, Wednesday, the eagle-eyed Guy Cocker noticed that Rockstar Games has officially announced its mega-hit, Grand Theft Auto IV, is coming to the PC.
Originally available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the game, which had sold more than 8.5 million copies through early June, will be available on PCs--though not Macs, apparently--on November 18 in North America and on November 21 in Europe.
This is a big move for Rockstar Games because it opens up GTA IV to an even bigger audience than could already play it. And that likely means many more millions of units sold to players who feel they simply don't want to put down the cash for a next-gen video game console like the Xbox or the PS3. And just in time for the holidays.
Further, it means that PC gamers, who have been able to play previous versions of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, will be left behind their console-owning friends no longer. All of which means more bins full of cash for Rockstar and its Take-Two owners.
According to Rockstar, the PC version of the game will feature an exclusive multi-player version. And one wonders if that could lead some players who already have the game for the Xbox 360 or PS3 to buy it for the PC as well. Again, more riches for the publisher.
If worldwide headlines about the record-setting first-day and first-week sales of Grand Theft Auto IV weren't enough, the game's publisher and its developer, Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games, now have a Guinness world record to boot.
On Tuesday morning, Guinness issued a press release certifying the game's insanely profitable launch as the entertainment industry's best ever for one day ($310 million) and one week ($500 million).
Interestingly, in stories I've written about this previously, I wrote that GTA IV had broken the single-day record of $170 million previously held by Bungie Studio's Xbox 360 game, Halo 3. In many stories, by both me and others, it has been exhaustively pointed out that the best video game launches had far outdone those by the best films.
According to the Guinness release, however, the previous record was actually not a video game at all. Rather, it was J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, the final book in that cash-cow series, which when it launched last July, earned $220 million in its first 24 hours.
If this is true, then Microsoft--which owned Bungie at the time--was wrong when it touted the first-day sales of Halo 3 as the then-best entertainment-industry launch.
Funny that despite the incredible sales of the last Harry Potter, no one, myself included, had thought to include books on the list of best launches.
Well, no matter. Now, even that record has fallen to the might of the GTA IV machine.
Humorously, as part of its release, Guinness is hawking its new Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, obviously trying to tie the GTA IV record to the new book. It's a natural link to make, of course, although the book was published before the new record.
I have the book, and it's kind of fun. There's a lot of interesting video game trivia, obscure records, and much more.
But, alas, no mention of the GTA IV record.
On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.
- prev
- 1
- next
