MS pay 50m USD for GTA IV episodes?
Exclusive 360 deal revealed
Take 2's Chief Financial Officer Laine Goldstein has hinted that the publisher was paid in the region of 50 million USD by Microsoft to make GTA IV episodic content exclusively for the Xbox 360 console. That's that latest scoop filtering out of North America today.
Microsoft were not mentioned directly but rather inferred in the conference call in which the advance was mentioned, according to UK site GamesIndustry.biz, with the payment being broken down into two installments linked to the release of the episodes via the Xbox Live Marketplace. An exclusivity deal of this scale would certainly aid the embattled Take 2's bottom line, while Microsoft are presumably prepared to pay such vast sums in order to get one over on Sony, the GTA series having been one the PS2's biggest hits.
"The first 25 is for the episodic content package that's supposed to go out and that is in March of '08," Goldstein told investors. "The second 25 will be for the second episodic, the episode, and that will be after in fiscal '08."
It only recently emerged that GTA IV episodic content would be exclusive to the Xbox 360. More soon on this.
