GameStop: 64 per cent of GTA units sold on 360

North American retailer GameStop has revealed to Newsweek’s Level Up blog that 64 per cent of its first-week GTA IV allocation was sold on Xbox 360.

However, in a phone conversation with Newsweek, PlayStation’s senior vice president of Marketing Peter Dille has claimed that the PS3 consumer is ‘overindexing’ on Grand Theft Auto IV.

GameStop probably does a little bit better with the early adopter crowd,” said Dille. 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.”

However, Xbox director of product management Aaron Greenberg feels that the split represents another PlayStation franchise moving over to Xbox. He told Newsweek:

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. It is fantastic to hear that we beat PS3 two to one on Grand Theft Auto sales from a major retailer like GameStop.”