With a week finally gone by after the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, Microsoft and Rockstar are truly loving life. Check out these stats on the over 6 million games sold within a week:
Actual MS sales data from last week shows Xbox 360 console sales at retail went up 54% week-over-week as a result of GTA's success
According to retailers more than 60% of all GTA games sold in the first week were the Xbox 360 version
Retailers are telling us that the game is attaching strongly to new console sales, with roughly 40% of new consoles selling with a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV
Regarding Xbox LIVE:
In the first week, more than 2.3 million people played Grand Theft Auto IV on Xbox LIVE
GTA IV is now the number one played game on Xbox LIVE
Over the weekend, we saw the Xbox LIVE service reach 1 million concurrent users
Gamers have unlocked more than 12 million achievements worth over 100 million gamerscore points in GTA
Grand Theft Auto IV set a new record for time played, with the average gamer spending more than four hours playing the game on LIVE in the first week alone
Congrats to Niko and the gang for a job well done. It's only going to get better.
In the arena that night, the whole last minute was drowned out by cheers — and then when the soaring music swelled, the confetti rained down as the harbinger of balloons and the hopeful first family took the stage, forget about it — it was a perfect end to a convention that last Monday, no one even knew if it would happen. But it did, and I'm so glad to have been there.
Reuters - Hurricane Ike barreled toward Cuba as an
extremely dangerous Category 4 storm on Sunday and was forecast
to sweep into the central Gulf of Mexico as a large and
powerful storm echoing Hurricane Gustav.
