On Monday, GameStop exclusively revealed to Level Up that during the first week that Grand Theft Auto IV was available in its U.S. stores, 64 percent of all copies sold were for Xbox 360 and 36 percent for Playstation 3. We sought reaction from both Microsoft and Sony to GameStop's results and our impromptu analysis, a portion of which we shared with you on Monday. Today, we're publishing our conversations with the two console manufacturers in their entirety. We spoke by phone with Peter Dille, senior vice president for marketing at Playstation. Here's what he had to say:

GameStop has exclusively provided me with the percentage split on their first week sales figures for GTA IV. According to them, 64 percent of the copies they sold were for Xbox 360, and 36 percent were for PS3. So given that Grand Theft Auto has primarily been associated with PlayStation platform since GTA III in 2001, are you surprised that the PS3 wasn't able to corral a higher share?

I'll take a couple steps back. First of all, we're not in a position to share retailer specific information. I'm not sure if you got that from Microsoft or Rockstar or GameStop themselves.

No, I got it from GameStop.

Okay. It's our experience that GameStop probably does a little bit better with the early adopter crowd. There's a larger installed base right now on Xbox 360 than on PS3. So it's not surprising that there's going to be more selling on Xbox 360 than PS3. Having said that, we're really excited about the ratio. If I had an installed base advantage of 3-1, I wouldn't be crowing too much about a 60-40 sales advantage. We think it's not as high as what GameStop's telling you, if you look at [the full picture on] the national level. They're outselling us, but not by that same margin, and it's because of their installed base lead. With an installed base lead that's close to 3-1, if you're bragging about a 60-40 software split, it's clear evidence that the Playstation 3 consumer is overindexing on GTA IV, and the Playstation brand loyalty that we've been talking about is bearing itself out in the marketplace as we speak.

So when you were looking at the release of the game, you didn't think that the history of GTA on Playstation was necessarily going to bring you guys to 50 percent parity or more [in terms of GTA IV market share]?

To read the rest of our conversation with Dille in its entirety, click on the link below. 

 

On Monday, GameStop exclusively revealed to Level Up that during the first week that Grand Theft Auto IV was available in its U.S. stores, 64 percent of all copies sold were for Xbox 360 and 36 percent for Playstation 3. We sought reaction from both Microsoft and Sony to GameStop's results and our impromptu analysis, a portion of which we shared with you on Monday. Today, we're publishing our conversations with the two console manufacturers in their entirety. First up is Aaron Greenberg, director of product management at Microsoft. Here's what he told us via email:

GameStop has exclusively provided me with the percentage split on their first week sales figures for Grand Theft Auto IV. According to them, 64 percent of the copies of GTA IV sold were for Xbox 360, while 36 percent were for PS3. Given that Grand Theft Auto has been primarily associated with Playstation platforms since Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, are you surprised that the Xbox 360 was able to corral this high a share?

I think many people have been surprised to see how well GTA IV is selling on Xbox 360 given the history of the franchise. These sales results add GTA IV to a long list of franchises that have switched over from Playstation to find a new home on Xbox 360 similar to what happened last year with titles like Madden and Guitar Hero. As you have covered on Level Up in the past, the majority of third party franchises are being developed first on our platform so they end up playing best on Xbox 360 and when you combine that with Xbox Live, we expect this trend to continue as more multiplatform releases hit the market. With that said, it is fantastic to hear that we beat PS3 two to one on Grand Theft Auto sales from a major retailer like GameStop.

Do you expect this gap to widen or narrow over the rest of the year, and why?

It's tough to say, I think GTA IV will have a much longer tail than some of the other blockbuster titles that have released on our platform. I expect that even this holiday as a lot of new console buyers enter the market we will see GTA IV remain a top title they purchase for the console. Then you also have to consider the excitement and buzz that will be generated when Rockstar starts to promote more details around the exclusive episodes coming to Xbox 360. However, it is clear that there is going to be a completely new Grand Theft Auto IV experience coming to Xbox 360 this fall and I think it is fair to expect that it is going to be a driving factor for another big round of sales of the game.

I did a little math of my own with the help of NPD, which says that through the end of March 2008, 9.9 million Xbox 360s and 4.1 million PS3s have been sold in the U.S. That's a total of 14 million units, of which 70.7 percent are Xbox 360 and 29.3 percent are PS3. When I compare this to GameStop's split of GTA IV sales--64 percent on Xbox 360 and 36 percent on PS3--it's clear that GTA IV underperformed on Xbox 360 relative to Microsoft's pre-April installed base, while it exceeded expectations on PS3 relative to Sony's pre-April installed base. What's your reaction to this, and to what do you attribute this result?

To read the rest of what Greenberg had to say, click on the link below. 

 Diagram of the influenza virus, courtesy Chris Bickel/Science

In Part I of Bill Harris' 180 Degrees column, he and Armageddon Empires' creator Vic Davis discussed how Davis got into game development, as well as the gamer interest and sales pattern for AE during its first three months of release. In today's second and final installment, the two examine the impact of influential journalists and outlets had on AE's sales in the months that followed. Finally, Harris steps back from his interview to extract some lessons that are invaluable to understanding how independent developers must approach their publicity and marketing campaigns differently from their peers at the big publishers--what Harris calls "the infection vector." Enjoy.

***

Part Three: Post-Release, Four to Six Months

At the end of October, Armageddon Empires was selected as "Indie Pick of the Month" in Games for Windows magazine. With that mention, page views on the website went up sixty percent in one week.

Yes, it was a real boost. Breaking the downward trend was a huge morale booster. The sales benefit was not immediately noticeable and still pretty modest, but it was a definite turning point. I'm still trying to figure out a model for how customers come to make their purchase decision for AE. You could probably identify sub-groups of customers... those who bought within the first 48 hours, those who spend a week with the demo, those who needed to hear something positive from a third party, and those who are still on the fence but might revisit it when their gaming backlog gets whittled down...that type of thing.

Then, in December, there were three prominent mentions. First, in the "Tom vs. Bruce" feature in Games for Windows. A week later, Kieron Gillen posted a highly favorable review at Eurogamer. At almost the same time, Tom Chick put AE as #4 in his top games of 2007 list.

There was more. In early January, Gamasutra/AIGameDev.com gave Armageddon Empires the "Best A.I. in an Independent Game" award, and Bill Trotter posted another highly favorable review at The Wargamer.

Here's what page views and sales look like with the second three months added (the arrow marks three months from launch):

To read the second and final part of Harris' column in full, click on the link below. 

 

Before the April 29th launch of Grand Theft Auto, industry observers declared their intentions to use the sales as a way of determining the state of the ongoing battle between the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. After all, the Xbox 360 has the installed base advantage, with 9.9 million units sold since its November 2005 debut as compared to 4.1 million units of PS3 since its arrival November 2006, according to the market researchers at the NPD Group. What's more, savvy gamers would certainly know that Xbox 360 would be the exclusive home for Rockstar Games' planned-but-as-yet-unrevealed downloadable content. But the last five major Grand Theft Auto games either premiered on or remained exclusive to PS2 and PSP, and the bulk of those sales took place on PlayStation platforms. So could consumers' perception that GTA is somehow a PlayStation franchise give Sony the edge in unit sales, or at least enable the installed base-lagging PS3 to punch above its weight and take a greater share of GTA IV units sold than its market share would suggest?

We won't have a complete answer about how things shook out here in the United States until later this week, when the NPD Group releases its sales data for the month of April. But thanks to the kind folks at GameStop--North America's largest specialty videogame retailer--we've got a partial answer. According to sales information that GameStop has released exclusively to Level Up, 64 percent of the copies of Grand Theft Auto IV sold during the first week were for Xbox 360, while 36 percent were sold on PS3. Put another way, that's a roughly 2 to 1 sales advantage for Xbox 360.

To read the rest of our exclusive report about the first week sales split for Grand Theft Auto IV at GameStop, along with reactions from both Microsoft and Sony, click on the link below. 

 Armageddon Empires, developed and published by Cryptic Comet

It's been almost three weeks since we unveiled our plans to add a select group of columnists who would contribute monthly posts to Level Up. Today, we're pleased to introduce our third columnist: Bill Harris of the blog Dubious Quality. "Smart and caustic" is how we described Harris' writing when he made his Level Up debut last fall with a provocative post titled "How the Videogame Industry Shot Itself In the Joystick--and Why the Wii Has Stopped the Bleeding." The Austin, Texas-based analyst (who does not cover videogames in a professional capacity) will share his thoughtful, acerbic and often contrary observations with the Level Up faithful in a monthly series titled 180 Degrees. In his first column, which we're presenting to you in two parts, Harris speaks with designer and developer Vic Davis about the unusual path to success for his independently released turn-based strategy game Armageddon Empires, complete with charts derived from sales and site traffic data that Davis helpfully provided. For some excellent insights into how an indie developer can overcome the challenge of reaching an audience, read on.

***

On July 18, 2007, Vic Davis and Cryptic Comet released Armageddon Empires, a turn-based strategy game in a post-apocalyptic setting.

There was very little pre-release publicity, which is not unusual for an indie game. And like most indie games, the initial interest in Armageddon Empires steadily dropped in the first three months following release.

At this point, Armageddon Empires was on a very traditional arc for an indie game. This arc would end, soon, in game death.

Then, a funny thing happened. It didn't.

Instead, Armageddon Empires became the surprise indie hit of 2007, and sales have continued to increase into 2008. What made this game different is an interesting case study for indie developers who are having difficulty getting traction with their own games. I interviewed designer and developer Vic Davis, who shared his insight on the process of getting an indie game noticed.

Part One: Pre-release

You're 39 years old and you're tired of working for someone else, so you decide to make a game. That really sounds quite insane.

After I got out of the military I had intended to go back and work in the intelligence community when I finished my graduate degree. After my first child was born, though, I started re-evaluating priorities. I wanted to control my own fate and make my own decisions. I also had to come to grips with the fact that I enjoyed work more as a craftsman (even if digital) than a leader.

What made you decide to get into gaming development?

To read Part I of Harris' column in its entirety, click on the link below.

 

When the CEO of the world's largest videogame publisher takes repeated shots at the runner-up, even a journalist must eventually take note and seek comment. That's exactly what we did after noticing three separate statements in which Activision CEO Bobby Kotick had taken a dig at Electronic Arts, including an accusation that EA has been "taking the soul" out of a lot of the studios it purchased. To address this string of criticism, we sent some questions over to Jeff Brown, EA's vice president of corporate communications, for the company's official response. Here's what he wrote back:

In a recent Q&A with Portfolio, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick had the following exchange with the interviewer:

Is there a key to Activision's growth?

It's about really being considerate of the culture in the game studios that Activision buys. That's the biggest difference between us and any of our competitors. We built a model that celebrates entrepreneurial, opportunistic, independent values. It's almost the opposite of Electronic Arts, which has commoditized development. It did a very good job of taking the soul out of a lot of the studios it acquired.

What was the reaction of the executives at Electronic Arts when they read that quote?

The truth is, everyone laughed. In the past year EA has made radical changes to decentralize the company and put creative control back in the hands of development teams. It's too early to declare victory but if you talk to people like Patrick Soderlund at dice in Stockholm, Mark Jacobs at Mythic in Virginia or Josh Resnick at Pandemic--they'll probably tell you that it's working. They get a lot of resources and creative freedom. That freedom has already contributed new start-ups like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge and Boom Blox and there's a lot of others to be announced soon.

EA CEO John Riccitiello has made numerous recent remarks about EA's shift away from a command-and-control model towards a city-state model, in which individual studios and teams have more control over their own destiny. Do remarks like this suggest that he has more to do to change the perception of EA among his peers, or is something else at work? Which studios would you point to at EA that still have their souls intact?

 Poster for the 2001 film "Antitrust," courtesy impawards.com

Oft-quoted Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter isn't just ubiquitous, he's also multifarious. Did you know that in addition to being a financial wizard (Level 60, no doubt) with 15 years of mergers and acquisitions experience under his belt, he also has a law degree from Pepperdine and a master of laws in taxation? We bring this up because in today's installment of Verbatim, we've got a full-scale legal battle among three parties over the best way to interpret the antirust implications--or lack thereof--in Electronic Arts' proposed acquisition of Take-Two. The combatants are as follows:

• Michael Pachter (see above for his extensive credentials)
• Justin Blankenship, Level Up legal affairs columnist; former Federal Trade Commission lawyer (in the Mergers 2 division, which reviewed mergers in the chemical, technology, and entertainment fields)
• Mark Methenitis, editor-in-chief of the Law of the Game blog; and lawblogger for Joystiq; and a licensed attorney in Texas

We've even got a journalist caught in the crossfire: GamePolitics' Dennis McCauley.

The idea behind Verbatim is that we scour the Internet for what various people have said about a particular topic; isolate the most salient excerpts; and compile them in a single, convenient location for your reading pleasure. To see how these lawyers (and journalist) debated this particular issue, click on the link below.

 Aerosmith singer Steve Tyler in concert

With the rising popularity of rhythm games like SingStar, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, is it only a matter of time before some acts start going exclusive in exchange for more loot. Ever since Harmonix and MTV Games revealed last year that they would be offering full-length albums for download in Rock Band, followed by Red Octane and Activision's announcement that they planned to build an entire Guitar Hero game around a single band like Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, we've wondered whether the game makers were locking up exclusive rights to featured acts. It hasn't been easy finding out, because the relevant developers and publishers have been surprisingly reticent to discuss this matter.

Still, we persevered, and with an assist from NEWSWEEK business reporter Ashley Harris, we've learned that Aerosmith is indeed exclusive to Guitar Hero for an unspecified period of time. "It's an exclusive deal for this game," Aerosmith publicist Marcee Rondon told Harris. We confirmed this with Tim Riley, Activision's vice president of music affairs, who told us through Activision PR that "I can say that we do have the band exclusively, and their catalogue should be exclusive to us beyond the one or two tracks they had licensed out to Rock Band before we made our deal." (According to MTV's Rhythm Game Track Finder, it's one song: "Train Kept a Rollin'.")

 Electronic Arts' famed "Can A Computer Make You Cry?" print ad, which departing exec Bing Gordon helped create 

Once we got wind last week of William 'Bing' Gordon's impending departure from Electronic Arts, we quickly sought a pre-briefing, to which the PR teams at both Electronic Arts and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers graciously assented. We spoke by phone yesterday evening with Gordon, whose laconic California drawl belies one of the industry's most colorful and outspoken characters. Last night's chat, however, found him in a more contemplative mood, as he looked back at his tenure at EA--where he's credited with everything from creating the EA Sports brand to founding EA's studio system--and forward at the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as he enters the dizzying world of venture capital. To give you a sample of our conversation as quickly as possible, we've given Gordon the Just the FAQs treatment, but we plan to publish a more complete Q&A from our wide-ranging conversation in the days to come.

Why did Gordon decide to leave Electronic Arts for Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers?

Three reasons. First, he's comfortable with the partners at Kleiner Perkins. "I've known the leading partners at Kleiner since John Doerr and Brook Byers made a founding investment in Electronic Arts in '82," Gordon told us. "Then Brook went on the board, and Brook was kind of the cool guy on the board; deeply believes in entertainment and entrepreneurial possibilities. So he shaped my thinking about what a board member can be."

Over the last decade, Gordon has stopped by Kleiner Perkins from time to time to see what they've been up to. This, he says, resulted in him being invited to join the boards of such Kleiner Perkins investments as Amazon and Audible. "I kind of have 25 years with them. Like 'em; get my best reading list from them. So that's kind of the first thing: long experience and love for the Kleiner way of doing things."

What's the second reason?

With an empty nest looming as his daughters go off to college, he's been wondering about the second act in his American life. "I've got 15 more years to do something—might be cool to do something else" says Gordon of his thought process. "The first thing that popped into my head was Kleiner. Just unbidden, popped into my mind."

And the third?

To read the rest of today's installment of Just the FAQs, click on the link below.

 Bing Gordon (far right) pictured with Jeff Bezos, Will Wright and Robin Williams,  courtesy valleywag.com 

The renowned venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has just announced something that we learned late last week. Electronic Arts chief creative officer William 'Bing' Gordon will join Kleiner Perkins as a partner in June, serving alongside such luminaries as John Doerr, Bill Joy and Al Gore. According to Gordon, with whom we spoke by phone on Sunday evening, the first week of June will be his last at EA before starting at Kleiner Perkins on June 9th. "Being on campus with young people in videogame classes; seeing what they're interested in; seeing what's going on with the Internet turning into new kinds of platforms, from iPhone to Facebook and Amazon Web Services--I've gotten fired up about an all-new ride," Gordon told us when we asked why he was moving on from the company that he helped build into a global power.

That's not all the generally outspoken Gordon had to say. To read our Just the FAQs post with chunks of our conversation, click here. To read Kleiner Perkins' press release announcing his joining the firm, click on the link below.

 

Whether it's the Knicks and the Lakers, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the L.A. Dodgers or Biggie and Tupac, there's always been a rivalry between New York and California. But when it comes to videogames, NY might as well be bringing a knife to a gunfight. Sure, we've got Take-Two, or as we like to call it, The House That Rockstar Built. There's Vicarious Visions, those masters of handheld development. Kaos Studios, which worked on Battlefield for EA and just did Frontlines: Fuel of War for THQ, is also located in our fair state, as are smaller developers like Gamelab, which brought us Diner Dash.

But compared to Northern California (Electronic Arts, Lucasarts, Sega and Namco's U.S. HQs, etc.), which even stole 2K Games from us, and Southern California (Activision, THQ, Warner Bros Interactive, Disney Interactive, Brash Entertainment and more) and, well, it's clear where NYC's interactive inferiority complex comes from. So when we got wind that a brand new publisher was debuting not only in our adoptive state, but a mere subway ride away from Level Up's midtown HQ, we pulled out all the stops to bring you this news--and an exclusive interview with the company's CEO--first.

The publisher in question is GreenScreen Interactive. "It was initially founded by Ryan Brant, Mark Seremet and Susan Cummings," CEO Ron Chaimowitz told us yesterday during an exclusive interview at his SoHo offices. "Mark and Ryan were founders of take-Two Interactive, and Susan was at Take-Two and actually worked with Ryan to build the 2K label very successfully from zero to $400 million over four years." Chaimowitz is himself no slouch, having co-founded GT Interactive Software in 1993 and published such well-known titles as Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem and Unreal.

To read the rest of our post on GreenScreen Interactive as well as the full text of the company's press release, click on the link below.

 Monopoly, developed by Bright Light and published by EA Casual 

Last week at a media event in New York City, Electronic Arts unveiled its take on Hasbro's enduring Monopoly. It's currently in development for Wii, 360 and PlayStation 2, with the Wii serving as the lead platform. The game will be released this fall by the EA Casual division, at the same time as the relaunch of Hasbro's board game Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition, so named because Hasbro is retiring such famous spots as "Boardwalk" and "Park Place" with the names of cities from around, um, the world. We played it at the event, where EA's reps were focused on showing off The Richest, a new spin on Monopoly that blends mini-games with a sped-up version of the classic gameplay for a clever, highly entertaining version of Monopoly whose playtime is measured in minutes, not hours. See below for the press release, and be sure to check back for the newest installment of our Just the FAQs interview series, in which we speak with the title's U.K. developers.

To read EA's press release, click on the link below.

We've never quite been able to appreciate the phenomenon that is Second Life. Nevertheless, even the metaverse-averse like ourselves can appreciate the wizardry involved in our exclusive video demonstration of Second Life on a mobile phone. That wizardry is made possible by a startup called Vollee, which is capable of serving up games whose graphics and CPU requirements are more demanding than a typical phone can handle to the Vollee client which users install on their handsets. The folks at Vollee remap the menus and controls for each game to optimize them for the smaller screen and the limited controls. During a recent demonstration at Level Up HQ, we saw a PS2 board sports game running reasonably well on a phone. We'll have more coverage of Vollee in the weeks to come, as well as our thoughts on the implications of this technology, but for now, enjoy the video.

 

Senator? You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license, which I would appreciate if you would put up personally.
--Michael Corleone in "The Godfather: Part II"

For a deal that's yet to be consummated, there's been a whole lot of activity surrounding Electronic Arts' proposed acquisition of Take-Two. First came the news that the Federal Trade Commission had requested further information and additional time to complete its review of the deal--the "hard look" at the deal that Level Up's own guest poster and former FTC lawyer Justin Blankenship had predicted. Next, at its shareholders meeting last night, Take-Two's board continued to urge its stock owners to reject EA's tender offer.

Finally, this morning, EA announced that it had extended the deadline for its tender offer to May 16th--while reducing the value of its offer from $26 per share to $25.74 to reflect the additional shares of restricted stock that have been granted to Take-Two management. To make sense of all of the head-spinning feints and counter-moves, we shot an email over to the omnipresent Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter. Here's what he had to say:

What should we make of Electronic Arts' decision to extend its tender offer to Take-Two shareholders to May 16th, 2008?

They extended because they fully intend to wage a proxy battle over the next month. That will essentially involve nominating a new board and soliciting the vote of 50.01 percent ofall shareholders (including those who could not vote yesterday because they bought after February 19). If they win the proxy battle, they will take control of Take-Two.

Is there anything significant about that date?

 The cover for the Pixies' 1989 album "Doolittle"

During our phone briefing yesterday with Harmonix CEO and co-founder Alex Rigopulos and Paul DeGooyer, senior vice president of Electronic Games & Music, we uncovered a slew of tidbits about their philosophy regarding future releases of albums, tracks and the overall Rock Band "platform," as term Rigopulos used on more than one occasion during our chat. We'll serve up the full text of this interview at a later date, but in the meantime, here are some of the highlights, in the form of an FAQ:

When is the next album coming out?

Next month.

What is it?

"The Cars," by, um, The Cars.

Anything after that?

In June, they plan to release "Doolittle," by the Pixies. "This is the beginning of what will be a regular flow of full albums," says Harmonix's Rigopulos.

"Who Are You"? More like "Where Are You"? Why wasn't The Who's "Who's Next" the first album release, as previously expected?

Because Harmonix does not yet have everything it needs to create all of the tracks. "We do require specialized audio mixes in the form of stems," says MTV's DeGooyer. "And to be perfectly candid, [Judas Priest's "Screaming For Vengeance'] is the first one that was ready."

Can I play "Screaming For Vengeance" as Rob Halford or Glenn Tipton?

To read the rest of our FAQ on Rock Band's full-length albums, click on the link below.