While building the store lists for the IATB Amazon Store, I popped into the Playstation 3 section, and was presented with the above image. It might be a little small, so here it is at 1:1 screen size:

As you can see, the Xbox 360 version of GTA is leading the Playstation 3 version by 60:40 right now. That’s rather interesting because of a number of factors:

• These are preorder numbers from a single Internet retailer. They’re probably indicative of trends across the US though, even in the B&M stores.
• The GTA series was born on the PC, but then moved to console. It eventually became recognized as a major Playstation brand, with Xbox and PC ports coming out later than Playstation versions.
• GTA games have been system sellers in the past for the Playstation.
• Microsoft spent a lot of money securing advance rights on downloadable content from the GTA developers and stole a lot of Sony’s thunder in doing so.
• The Xbox 360 version may suffer from the fact that Microsoft is pushing for it to work across all versions of the 360, including the Core, which doesn’t come with a hard drive.
• There are certainly more Xbox 360s in the hands of consumers than there are PS3s.
• The price for both games is the same, but the price of the console isn’t. It’s still cheaper to get an Xbox 360 than it is to get a PS3, even with the price drops.
• The release date for both is October 16th. That’s a little less than 2 months away.
• Most journalists and analysts will focus on sales out of the gate, rather than over a year or so.

There’s also a whole lot of discussion going on at the Amazon comparison page.

My thoughts are this: GTA is one of those seminal brands that has a core following of players behind it. Most of these players will have played it on one platform and will continue to play it on that platform. The battleground really becomes generating sales to new gamers that haven’t played the game before, and this is where the 360 has the lead. Of course, the 360 also has a habit of dying on gamers, so this might affect things a little. Ultimately, sales of this game will be strong no matter what. Once the price drops by about 25% more people will pick it up and will play it. 

Keep in mind that these numbers can change. There’s still almost 2 months to the release date, and in the past the GTA franchise has sold systems. Tie this into the fire sale that Sony has had on the 60Gb and you might get a bunch of sales leading into October. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Categories: Opine, Uncategorized //