Take-Two praises release breaks for Grand Theft Auto's healthy figure
More series copies shifted than Tetris?
Some 125 million copies of Grand Theft Auto games have shipped since the series' introduction, publisher Take-Two Interactive has claimed.
While it would be easy to celebrate that such figures means GTA easily challenges Tetris for fifth place in the world best-selling franchise table - behind Mario, Pokemon, Wii Sports/Play/Fit and The Sims - Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick instead took a pop at those titles creeping up the list behind it, in particular series with annual releases such as Call of Duty.
Zelnek, speaking at the Credit Suisse 2012 Technology Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, indicated he believed that there has been a large year-on-year drop in sales for Activision's most-recent CoD entry, Black Ops 2 this month, but that has never been the case with GTA, which apparently does better every time.
GTA V: shooting down the competition
Activision, however, said Black Ops 2 managed to generate half a billion dollars in sales in its first day of sales, well ahead of the $360m the publisher made through day-one sales of the original Black Ops in 2011.
"Our view is it's hard to make permanent intellectual properties if you annualise it," he said, though he makes an exception for sports titles. "So far that's proven to be the case. IP that is annualised eventually seems to hit the wall and we don't want our IP to hit the wall."
GTA's fanbase on the other hand will have been patiently waiting five years for their next dose of action, giving Rockstar plenty of time to develop an expanded experience the hype generally lives up to.
Rockstar's latest GTA V trailer was released earlier this month amid plenty of details of the forthcoming criminal venture. The game will be released next Spring. ®
COMMENTS
Quality not Quantity
When will people ever learn this for any creative medium.
Sorry i forgot when games do not sell it is nothing to do with being cliched, repetitive, derivative crap its because of piracy
GTA4 rocked, as did GTA3. By comparison, the Call Of Duty games really are asinine in their game play.
I still recall the first time I played a CoD game. I nearly ran out of ammo trying to clear all the enemies from the rooftops, windows and balconies so that my squad could traverse the street unmolested until I realised that the idiotic game had infinitely respawning enemies and that the "correct" way to progress is to run as fast as you can while dodging bullets until you get to the next capture point so the enemies stop spawning.
Once you figure that out you can finish the game in an afternoon. There is no incentive to use proper tactics at all.
Extremely stupid, and so typical of the dumbed down crap that is popular these days.
Yeah it does seem unfair imo, but wikispeaks. The "Wii" games are a franchise in their own right, apparently.
Personally, I think the fact Tetris numbers are made up of its appearance on calculators is a bit unfair in the first place anyway.
Why are Wii Sports/Play/Fit allowed to be counted as one, or is it that they have each sold the same as each other and are jointly holding third spot?
