As it turns out, GameStop’s claim that 64% of all copies of GTA IV sold were on Xbox 360 was spot on — 64.9% is the exact number if you do the math with NPD’s numbers for the month of April. Between the 360 and PS3 versions of the game, GTA IV managed to sell 2.85 million even though it was released on April 29 — not too shabby.

Mario Kart Wii, meanwhile, sold more than a million copies. That’s a million plastic wheels out there in the wild, imparing people’s ability to control the game properly. And of course, with the number of Wii systems that sold in April, you know you’re going to see a lot of Wii Play sales, and that we did. Smash Bros. had a big drop off, from 2.7 million in March down to 326k in April. Not that Nintendo should be complaining, with five of their games in the top ten, with six of the top ten on Nintendo platforms.

April 2008 Software Sales

GTA IV (360) – 1.85M
Mario Kart Wii w/ wheel (Wii) – 1.12M
GTA IV (PS3) – 1.00M
Wii Play (Wii) – 360,000
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) – 326,000
Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (PS3) – 224,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness (DS) – 202,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time (DS) – 202,000
Guitar Hero III (Wii) – 152,000
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360) – 141,000

Call of Duty 4 on 360 continues to do its best Mustafa impression, as it just refuses to be kicked out of the top ten. Could next month finally see it kicked out? I’m going to go ahead and predict a bold “no.”

According to at least one business news source the CBS buyout of CNet is part of growing trend involving companies trying to reach gamers. It’s all about demographics.

In the case of CBS-Cnet, the so-called synergies lie in core demographics. By the very nature of Cnet’s tech focus, its audience features the increasingly hard-to-reach 18-to-34-year-old men who prefer ”Grand Theft Auto IV” and ”Indiana Jones” to TV viewing — unless there’s a ball game on, of course.

The article mentions the recent Blockbuster offer to Circuit City and Microsoft’s attempted hostile take over Yahoo! as well. The common theme is the growing influence of gamers on the economic market. Yes gamers we shall rule the world! It’s only a matter of time.

via The Deal.com

Oh, silly Uwe. You make so very many gamers angry with your terrible videogame-to-movie adaptations and box your critics and send angry messages to Wired. It’s all very amusing to me, since I don’t expect the movies he does to be any good regardless of the director, but his antics just make everything hilarious.

Boll’s most recent noteworthy actions were his comments on the inevitable Grand Theft Auto film. I’ll let you read his statement in its entirety, but first, you know who I think would be perfect to do a GTA film?

Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

With puppets.

Grand Theft Auto would be super interesting for me, and I think I would actually be the right guy to do it, because my movies are all bloody and violent and I don’t have a problem with action scenes. But look, they will go, in the end, with a Michael Bay or a Brett Ratner, and it will be a PG-13 movie made for $150 million. I think it would be better to make a $30 million, very hard, brutal movie without compromising, but I’m not optimistic.

A $30 million Uwe Boll GTA movie, or a $150 million Michael Bay GTA movie. Am I in hell?

via Game|Life

Firefly Studio’s Simon Bradbury sat down for a Q&A with Gamasutra. The interview is full of crunchy bits from the development aspect of gaming. The Dungeon Hero and Stronghold Crusader Extreme designer talks about organic and inorganic AI pathfinding as well as going postmodern with NPC dialogue cues. There are bits about the Stronghold Crusader sequel as well as Firefly’s new IP Dungeon Hero. Bradbury also talks about working with Take-Two in the past and Gamecock at this time.

One of the things Bradbury talks about is what he believes makes a successful offline PC game at a time where MMOs and casual games are dominant.

“…it’s going to be maybe a bit more casual and that’s where we’ve pitched Dungeon Hero. The combat’s got to be fun, and easy, but the skill is to make a game that is very accessible and casual, but at the same time rewards people who want to work at it.

But you haven’t got to make the game hard to start with, like a lot of games do. For example, remembering all the combos – it’s really not fun – so we wanted a game where you can see all the moves from the start, and the skill is using them properly.”

Read the full Q&A with Simon Bradbury on Gamasutra.

Welcome to the latest edition of Pachter Predicts, where Wedbush Morgan analyst and my sworn adversary Michael Pachter makes his predictions for the past month’s console sales here in the United States. For the second straight month, Pachter has predicted that the PlayStation 3 outsold the Xbox 360. (Although last month his prediction turned out wrong, as the 360 had a 5,000 unit edge over the PS3.)

Here are his predictions, with last month’s numbers in parentheses:

Wii: 600,000 (721,000)
PS3: 290,000 (257,000)
Xbox 360: 275,000 (262,000)
PS2: 160,000 (216,000)
DS: 550,000 (698,000)
PSP: 235,000 (297,000)

If Pachter turns out to be right, it looks like the 360 and PS3 won’t have seen a major boost in sales as many have thought they would. He attributes his predicted higher sales of the DS and Wii to their greater availability.

As for Grand Theft Auto IV, he expects it to have sold 3.3 million units in its first six days in the US alone, and also notes that he expects 20 games to have cracked the 100,000 unit mark in April, compared with only nine last year.

Those of you who still find yourself looking for a Wii, Pachter thinks that situation might be soon resolving itself: “We believe that Nintendo has diverted a significant portion of its available supply to Europe since April 2007, as the weakening dollar has made US sales less profitable for the company… We expect the supply situation will begin to improve over the next several months. We expect a surge in supply in the US for Wii Fit’s May 21 launch here, and believe we could see as many as 900,000 Wii units show up at retail this month (May).”

via Next Gen

Aside from World of Warcraft, the biggest MMO of 2007 and so far this year isn’t one you would name off the top of your head. According to the author of an article up on Eurogamer; it’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The piece goes on to defend the position that although CoD4 isn’t an MMO in the strictest sense of the definition, it does share many of the same gameplay elements that typify an MMO.

Call of Duty 4 proves that it’s possible to take some of the things that MMOs do right and distil them for a game that wouldn’t traditionally be seen as an MMO. The potency of the idea, even in this form, is obvious; the drive to play just a little bit more, because there’s a reward waiting just up ahead, is an incredibly powerful and addictive force for players

I can actually agree with the author on most of his points, and the idea isn’t one that hasn’t been presented before. The success of MMOs is changing the way traditional video games are being designed. One of the latest examples of this trend is the multi-player mode in RockStar’s Grand Theft Auto IV. I think we’re going to see the games industry moving ever closer to this formula as gamers demand more of a social element to their gaming experience.

via Eurogamer

EA issued a press release yesterday regarding another bid at trying to take over Take-Two, and while we felt that this was just another chapter in the soap opera not worth mentioning, today, I just had to post something about it because our favorite analyst has thrown his two cents in on the subject.Michael Patcher, whom one of our writers calls “his nemesis” has had plenty to say regarding the back and forth between both companies, and while visiting Game Politics this morning, I came across this lovely bit of information.

Apparently, EA has only $1.7 billion in the bank, and the deal they have offered Take-Two deal is $2.1 billion, so they have talked to Morgan Stanley, the Bank of Nova Scotia and several other financial institutions who have all agreed to loan them some money so as to secure the deal.

Here is what I pulled from Game Politics:

It is something that should be expected. After [the acquisition of] Pandemic/BioWare, EA has only around $1.7 billion in available cash… The Take-Two deal is around $2.1 billion… so they’re short. They also probably need around $400 million in available cash for working capital needs, so they need to raise around $800 million to complete the deal. The extra $200 million is just a cushion, although I suppose it could be construed as how much higher they’re willing to go [for Take-Two]…

The timing isn’t particularly unusual, a bit later than I would have thought, as they should have started the process on March 13 (when they went hostile). However, I have no experience in credit markets like we’re experiencing now, so maybe it’s normal to take 8 weeks to get something like this done. It’s also possible that they waited for their new CFO [Eric Brown] to start in order to allow him to negotiate terms…

I would not read any significance into the filing, other than to say that if they want to raise their offer price [for Take Two], they will likely need a higher credit line…

So EA, what are we going to do tonight? The same thing we do every night, Pinky – try to take over the world!

Via: Game Politics

Phil Villarreal of the Arizona Daily Star took the Parents Television Council up on an interview offer, and shot a few questions off to Dan Isett , PTC Director of Public Policy about Grand Theft Auto IV.We are all familiar with the level of hate the PTC has been spouting off regarding GTA IV of late, and some of it is just plain nonsense. Especially regarding getting “points” fro drunk driving. Thus, Villarreal, has shown just how ignorant of the game’s contents the PTC is, and follows is a transcript pulled directly from the interview.

When it comes to “Grand Theft Auto IV,” however, Isett is clueless. Here’s a transcript of part of our conversation.

Have you played the game?

“I’ve actually played ‘Grand Theft Auto IV,’ and it’s right in keeping with previous versions. The series continues to lower the bar and this is the first game that has an alcohol content warning. You get points for driving drunk in this game.”

You know that’s not true, right? The game doesn’t have points.

“If nothing else, it’s a rewarded activity. Necessary for advancement.”

I don’t think so.

“But there’s an alcohol content warning and a scene of drunk driving, correct?”

Yes. Did you play that part?

“No, no. I didn’t get that far.”

Are you a gamer at all? Do you play any games these days?

“I enjoy video games.”

What do you play?

“I have a lot of fun. I play all sorts of games. I actually have a Wii.”

What were the circumstances that you played “GTA IV?”

“I rented it at a friend’s house. I think that what’s important is it’s a horrifically violent game and if you want to quibble about extra points being granted, fine. It rewards every antisocial behavior.”

Isett said among the worst of such antisocial behavior is murder, and he played the game for a couple hours and was led by the game to kill other characters. When pressed for the circumstances in which he did the killing, because my and most other gamers’ first couple hours with the game were murder-free (although you do kill in self defense in some early missions), he refused to give any details.

I pressed him about why his organization is going after M-rated games rather than R-rated movies, and he kept repeating “the focus on this today is on video games, not movies.”

The comparison between movies and games isn’t valid, he said.

“I reject the argument that an M-rated game is comparable to an R-rated movie. One, it doesn’t require 30 hours of continuous game play to make your way through an R-rated movie.” Isett said scientific research proves games are more immersive than movies and should be treated differently.

As awkward as Isett sounds in those quotes, I was just as nonsensical when I accused Isett’s organization of wrongly declaring “Grand Theft Auto IV” was AO-rated in the press release.

Great job Phil! It is nice to see journalists with integrity and intelligence still exist the media.

Via: Game Politics and AZNightBuzz

“Pirates of the Caribbean” director Gore Verbinski is slated to direct the film adaptation of BioShock. According to Variety, the film will be developed by Universal Studios, which subsequently handed over a multimillion-dollar advance to Take-Two for the film rights.

Screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator) will be the scriptwriter and while Universal has not announced a release window, Verbinski said that pre-production will begin as when the script is finished and approved.

Strauss Zelnick, chairman for Take-Two and former President of Fox said the deal was structured to prevent any pre-production hang ups:

“The reason I structured it the way I did is to make sure it gets made. One of the things we decided early on is that we didn’t want to go through a producer. It’s terribly important to us to have a meaningful influence on how this project is produced.”

The Variety piece also mentions that BioShock creative director Ken Levine has been “regularly consulted” but having a formal role in the film’s process remains to be seen.

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed that it does not suck. Verbinski is a decent director, and even though the last Pirates film was awful in my opinion, you can’t totally blame him. He did the best he could with a shoddy script.

Via: Variety

Rockstar has the new Grand Theft Auto IV patch 1.0.1 up. There’s no official patch notes to go by at this time. However, word out is that it will most effect multiplayer. Some gamers are happy to now be able to get online with their PS3. However, there still some complaints with type 2 freeze. It seems there are a lot of mixed results being reported, but really if you want to play online with your PS3, you have no choice but to patch.

via US Playstation Boards – GTA 4 Patch