Not some chump pocket change and if it’s true that would make the game the most expensive ever to develop, beating down and mugging the crown from Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue.
ChartTrack data proclaims Xbox360 the winner for Niko sales, 55% went their way they say.
The UK industry monitor ChartTrack, showed the game as the fastest selling videogames title to ever grace British retail inside of 24 hours. They estimate 609,000 units were sold of Grand Theft Auto IV - day one.
Back in ‘04 San Andreas shifted 501,000 but IV has blown past that previous record for Rockstar. So the ‘console war’ that fanboys were gearing up for seems to have been clenched by Microsoft’s Xbox360 as they claim around 10% more units over Sony’s PS3. Either way that spells WIN for Rockstar Games.
”It’s looking very, very promising for Rockstar in terms of full week sales. Even if If they don’t even sell one more unit, the current figure would still make for an astounding week one performance,” ChartTrack director Dorian Bloch told MCV.
”Barring a catastrophe, with lorries bringing stock into stores going AWOL, we can only see that sales number going up and up.”
”The Bank Holiday weekend should be a particularly fruitful period – but it will be interesting to see how long the stock lasts as people rush to stores.”
If you’ve read the interviews with the Housers you’ll soon get the vibe of just how much passion from the Rockstar teams was bleed into GTA IV. Thousands of NYC photos, video recordings of traffic flows, thousands of lines of dialogue, scripting, marketing, wages for coding slaves… $100 million doesn’t seem that farfetched.
The only possible contender against GTA IV would be Metal Gear Solid 4 for PS3, we’ll just have to wait and see.
