As you may already know, Rockstar have recently announced that the previously Xbox 360 exclusive Grand Theft Auto IV DLC will be making it's way onto both the PS3 and PC. Now everybody can enjoy The Lost And The Damned and The Ballad Of Gay Tony, right? Wrong.
You may find this hard to believe because Rockstar announced this themselves but I have had email confirmation from Rockstar stating otherwise. It took multiple emails before I received an answer but eventually I managed to push through and got confirmation that it was exclusive.
"Microsoft paid for exclusive content and the got exclusive content, we're not risking anything by going back on our words", said one Rockstar representative.
You may be shocked to hear this; confused is probably more appropriate. I was also confused when I received the email, I knew it was true but I still didn't understand why they would announce something that wasn't going to be true.
So I hastily replied, with all the questions that I needed answers too. This time, I was fortunate enough to get answers back straight away.
Question 1: You said that the money from Microsoft was nothing more than an investment which you have paid back. How would this be breaking the contract?
Answer: "We never said that. I don't know where you read that but it isn't true. We are in fact under a contract with Microsoft, which prevents us from releasing it on any platform bar the 360."
Question 2: Why did you announce it for additional platforms when it isn't actually being released?
Answer: "There were various reasons for this actually. I'm not allowed to go into too much detail but it was done for the purposes of market research, we needed to see how people reacted to the statement. We looked at responses from different kind of gamers to gauge their reactions. Where they interested in it? What do the 360 owners things of this? Questions like that were essential to help develop future projects and we believe that this was the best way of obtaining the necessary information.
One Rockstar rep told me "We're just simply taking the piss".
