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Industry Fallout from GTA IV Delay

Posted by Zonk on from the crime-does-pay dept.

SET writes "MSNBC has an interesting writeup on the shakeups in the gaming industry following Take-Two's announcement that Grand Theft Auto IV has been delayed. The article examines the problems this creates for Microsoft and Sony, both of whom were expecting GTA IV to help boost Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 sales this coming holiday season. 'Analyst Michael Pachter told Web site GamesIndustry.biz that he believes Rockstar has delayed the game because it is struggling with development on the PlayStation 3. Sony denies this charge and said that the company has a dedicated team working with Rockstar on "GTA IV." They say they're not that worried about the delay and would prefer that Rockstar take the time it needs to perfect the game. "We'd love to have [it] out as soon as possible," said Sony spokesperson Dave Karakker. "But we've never had a single game make or break any of our platforms. That's not how we built 100 million sales of [the] PlayStation 2, and that's not how we'll build 100 million in sales of [the] PlayStation 3."'"

3 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Wake up for Sony Developer Support? by MadHatter2005 · · Score: 0, Troll

    I'm hoping that this delay will further wake up Sony to just how bad their developer support is compared to Microsoft. Developing a modern game is complicated enough without having deal with buggy SDK's, poorly documented pipelines, and badly translated documents describing cycle-counts that must be adhered to lest the whole thing seizes up. Since the PS2 was a success I guess Sony didn't feel the need to get their dev support in gear, but maybe with the struggles they're having with the PS3 it will focus more of their attention on this problem.

  2. Re:Huh? by SailorSpork · · Score: 1, Troll

    They [Sony] say they're not that worried about the delay and would prefer that Rockstar take the time it needs to perfect the game. In PR-Speak, this translates to "we want it pushed back as long as possible so that it runs as well on Sony hardware as Microsoft hardware." I don't think Sony would have said it quite this way if it was a multi-platform development issue.

    In addition, note that they didn't ask Microsoft if they minded the delay, because their response would be "of course we mind, its not developing for *our* platform that's holding the release date back."
  3. Re:So, come Christams time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    4.5 million sales, so far.


    Dreamcast sold 10m, quoth Wikipedia.

    Sony is in a world of hurt. None of their really big titles (Metal Gear, LittleBigPlanet, GTA) will make it in time for the Christmas season. That will hurt their sales a lot, and at a crucial time. The worse they do, the more resources US devs will shift to the 360, and Japanese to the Wii. In the end, a system lives or dies by its games, so reduced interest from the devs sets up a negative feedback cycle.

    Of course, Sony's not dead yet, and if they can limp on until 2009, maybe then they'll be able to catch up once their price drops and someone figures out how to use the Cell, but for the moment Sony is not in an enviable position at all.