Tag Archives: the lost and damned

Rockstar has announced it will be holding a Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer event tomorrow, December 2, to celebrate the game’s third anniversary of the PC release. Members of the Rockstar Social Club can participate in a three hour PC session of Grand Theft Auto IV along with Episodes from Liberty City from 4-7pm EST via Games for Windows LIVE. Participants will be entered into event sweepstakes featuring Rockstar Prize Packs with which include: original collectible GTA IV foam fingers, lapel pin sets, license plates, t-shirts and large character stickers. Special guest players from the GTA fansite community will also be invited to join in on Cops n’ Crooks, GTA Race, Team Deathmatch, and other modes requested by fans from The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Hit up the link for more information. Thanks, Blue.

If you live in North American, you may now run out and purchase the Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition at your local shop.

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Rockstar has revealed that GTA IV: Episodes from Liberty City will be delayed into April.

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GTA IV may be simply too large to succesfully carry DLC, Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter’s told VG247, as the majority of owners never actually finish the main game.

Pachter was talking in response to comments made earlier by AmTech analyst Ben Schachter (via Industrygamers and Joystiq), who expressed “concern” about the state of the GTA franchise in general thanks to The Lost and Damned, Gay Tony and other related games failing to match expectation.

“Ben’s right that the DLC disappointed, but I suspect that the reason is that GTA games are so massive that a substantial majority of the GTA audience hasn’t finished the core game, so they don’t feel especially compelled to buy the DLC,” Pachter said.

“GTA IV was at least a 50 hour game (for me, probably more like 100 hours), in contrast to the typical Call of Duty, which is a 6-10 hour game. Almost anyone who bought CoD finished it, and if they liked it (that’s a high percentage), they were interested in DLC. On the other hand, my guess is that fewer than 20% of GTA owners finished the game (100% of VG247 readers, of course), so fewer were interested in DLC.

“I think that is a fair assessment, and don’t think that the slow pace of DLC sales reflects poor performance for the franchise.”

They’re watching, kids. And they know you’re hardcore. No further GTA games are public at this point.

Looks like The Lost and Damned may be heading to PC if an Achievements page over on GTA4.net is to be believed.

Shown through the link there, is a screen grab of the Achievements listed for GFWL.

The Lost and Damned is only available on Xbox 360 as per an agreement with Rockstar, for the present at any rate.

We’ll sent a mail over and see if anyone bites, but if it is a surprise or a secret, don’t expect more than the canned “no comment” response.

Via CVG.

To celebrate the launch of Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City and The Ballad of Gay Tony, Rockstar has announced a weekend filled with multiplayer mayhem on Xbox Live.

From Friday, October 30 through Sunday, November 1 players can experience multiplayer in Liberty City with special guests from Rockstar North and singer/composer Henry Santos Jeter from the band, Aventura.

Multiplayer for the game will be free all weekend for people playing GTA IV, The Lost and Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Those wanting to play with the Rockstar team or Jeter should add the Gamertags posted below the break to their friends list.

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Rockstar has released the second official trailer for Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City, titled “There’s Always a Girl”.

Episodes From Liberty City will contain The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony in one package when released October 29 for 360.

Head on past the break for the video, complete with music from Roxette.

She’s got the look, fellas.

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During the Take-Two Q3 2009 financial call tonight, company CEO Ben Feder told investors that while retail is important, downloadable content is a main component to the company’s game releases.

“It’s clear that retail is the channel for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, there is a download component to a lot of our games, and there’ll continue to be a download component,” said Feder. “The games live online and they live at retail: they live at both. Whether that’s download first, retail second, or retail first download second, or some combination of the two, that’s an area that we’re going to experiment with because we’re innovating in that area.

“And it’s likely to change from title to title, but everything is going to have a download component, needs to have a download component. It’s one of the key lessons [of The Lost and Damned]. We’ll see how GTA in the retail SKU performs; we’re actually pretty optimistic about it.”

What that means is that all Take-Two games will have downloadable content of sorts from here on out. Granted this has been said before by the company, still, it’s nice to hear.

Microsoft has announced that next week’s Xbox Live Deal of the Week will be Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned.

Original price for the add-on was 1600 MS Points ($19.99/£13.60/€18.61) but you’ll get it for 1200 MS Points ($14.99/£10.20/€13.96) instead.

Basically you’ll be saving a five spot. Great. We just downloaded this two days ago.

Thanks, CVG.

Microsoft says that The Lost and Damned is not headed to PS3.

Responding to rumors that surfaced over the weekend from a PSW article, Gamespot contacted Microsoft for comment and were bluntly told by a rep that “the [GTA IV] episodes are exclusive to Xbox 360.”

Sony and Take-Two both refuse to comment on the rumor, so read into Microsoft’s response however you like.

More through the link.

PSW Magazine has stated in its latest issue that The Lost and Damned DLC for GTA IV will land on PS3 in August.

The article said that Microsoft only had a 6 month exclusivity deal for the content, which is where PSW came up with an August release window.

Take this as a rumor until official word comes out of Rockstar.

Via GamingFront.

SCEA hardware marketing boss John Koller has told VG247 that Microsoft’s apparent need to pay for exclusivity on certain products – such as the Lost and Damned – is borne from a self-perceived lack of strength in its first-party line-up.

“Microsoft has had a much more lenient policy to writing cheques than we do,” he said.

“We don’t feel the need to write cheques necessarily with every publisher, like they did with the Lost and Damned and some other titles, because we feel very strongly in our first-party line-up.

“I think it’s safe to say that we’d put our first-party line-up against anyone’s, and Microsoft and other manufacturers probably lead a little bit when they’re writing cheques about how they feel about their own internal line-up.”

Microsoft reportedly loaned Rockstar $50 million for two episodes of GTA IV DLC, although the figure’s never been confirmed.

The first episiode, The Lost and Damned, is rumoured to have sold in the region of 1 million units.

Koller was speaking at GDC last month.

We met up with Michael Pachter at GDC yesterday. In return for us showing him where to pick up his badge and sneaking him into the Luminaries Lunch, he told us why he thought Rockstar and Microsoft have yet to release any concrete download numbers for GTA IV DLC, The Lost and Damned.

The Wedbush Morgan analyst reckoned the content has so far failed to meet expectations for either company.

“It’s not like The Lost and Damned sucked, because it didn’t, and it’s not because [they] did not market it well,” he said.

“I just don’t think it has met their expectations, and it would have been better if they had set their expectations realistically.”

Pachter opined that the Live attach rate is one of the reasons The Lost and Damned hadn’t hit the intended mark.

“The main reason is because not too many Xbox 360 owners are hooked up to Xbox Live,” he said.

“100 percent of GTA IV owners are not hooked up to XBL. Therefore by definition, not every single person who owns GTA IV has Xbox Live. Because of this, I don’t think the numbers were as high as they had hoped for.

“When I personally look at DLC, I wait until the second one is released, that way I have over 40 hours of extra content instead of 20. It’s like playing a whole other game,” he added. “And I think a lot of people feel the same way.

He also added that he expects Rockstar to eventually offer a special edition of GTA IV to include both The Lost and Damned and the second, in-the-works piece of DLC.

Rockstar may not have released download numbers for The Lost and Damned yet, but that hasn’t stopped Michael Patcher from throwing around a “1 million” figure.

The analyst has estimated that Rockstar’s DLC has sold into seven digits so far, and will reach 2 million by the end of the year.

While he was peeking into his crystal ball, he also predicted that the second GTA IV episode is “likely” to arrive towards the end of Rockstar’s October 31 fiscal year.

Even more, he said today that a new console title in the GTA series will arrive by the end of 2010, and is likely to generate 50 percent more profits than previous installments, due to the growth in general console installed base.

“We don’t think it is reasonable to estimate that sales of GTA will double the prior version, but we think that a 25 – 30 per cent penetration is reasonable, suggesting 15 – 18 million units sold,” said Pachter.

“That means that Take-Two’s profits from the next iteration should be approximately 50 percent greater than from the last version.”

He reached this conclusion because in 2010 consoles are expected to be in 60 million homes in the US and Europe, with 30 percent of those owners likely to pick up a new GTA game.

We have put a call into Rockstar for comment.

Rockstar said today that exact figures for day one The Lost and Damned downloads are not to be released.

Yet.

“We don’t plan on releasing numbers at this point”, a Rockstar rep told us. “But [we] will certainly be in touch if and when that changes”.

Microsoft announced last week that The Lost and Damned set a monetary Live record during its first 24 hours of availability.

The GTA IV DLC released on February 27, and follows the exploits of a character in Liberty City’s The Lost biker gang.

It’s the first of two downloadable chapters for the 360 version of GTA IV.

Fat pipes are the way forward, Rockstar said this morning, claiming that downloading game content is the “future” for the medium.

“I think people are seeing this as the future of gaming, and we see it,” GTA dev chief Jeronimo Barrera said in the latest Major Nelson podcast.

“Obviously we’re going to continue to create more games, full games, but we’re also excited about what we’re going to do with Xbox Live and DLC.”

Barrera was talking in the second part of an interview on The Lost and Damned, GTA IV’s first 360-exclusive DLC episode.

The content released last week.

Rockstar dev head Jeronimo Barrera has said he believes The Lost and Damned script “exceeds” writing currently available in all forms of media.

“If you put The Lost and Damned up as a movie script, man, it’d be crazy,” he said, talking in the latest Major Nelson podcast.

“We want the gamers to realise that there’s a lot of super-talented people working on this stuff, and the quality and the calibre of their work, I think, exceeds what’s out there is all other mainstream media.”

Barrera went on to say that gaming as a medium should be reliant on plot and narrative.

“This medium needs to be driven be the quality of the content and the story,” he said. “Some stuff ends up being so generic these days. We want to have something that stands up to all mediums.”

He added: “Not to say there’s anything wrong with aliens and space marines and all that stuff, but for us it’s focussing on delivering quality, whether it’s the story, the animations, the art.”

The Lost and Damned, the first part of GTA IV’s two-part 360-exclusive DLC package, released last week.

Rockstar’s put out another The Lost and Damned video, as confirmed by the Major, this time focussing on character Billy Grey.

Billy’s the president of the Lost bike club. He’s well hard. The Lost and Damned releases, exclusively for 360, on February 17.

Rockstar has put out two new high res screenshots for the forthcoming Xbox 360 exclusive DLC, The Lost and Damned.

One of the pictures shows the bikers all leathered up and chatting, whereas the other depicts a man holding a sawn-off over his shoulder staring at Liberty City.

The Lost and Damned is coming next month.

Check them out.

By Mike Bowden

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Rockstar has release two short, new The Lost and Damned videos introducing you to two new characters in the forthcoming 360 exclusive DLC on February 17.

Billy Ray seems to think he’s some kind of leader and Malc reckons he’s all kinds of badass.

The Lost and Damned will cost 1600 MS Points and it seems everyone was pretty impressed with what they saw when the hands-ons were published last week.

After the break.

By Mike Bowden

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