Rockstar "investigating" GTA V early sales
Street date broken by online retailer Amazon
The street date for highly-anticipated release Grand Theft Auto V has been broken, with many consumers who pre-ordered their copies of the game receiving it this weekend.
The title is officially due for release on Tuesday but online retailer Amazon has already dispatched copies of the game, much to the delight of consumers, who have been posting images to social networking sites Instagram and Twitter.
Rockstar has issued a short note to GamesIndustry International stating: "We are in the process of investigating early 'sales' to determine how and why that is occurring."
The move will frustrate bricks-and-mortar retailers who only received their stock on Saturday and possibly push stores to begin selling the game early.
Grand Theft Auto V is likely to be one of the biggest sellers this generation with some estimating it could shift 18 million units during publisher Take-Two's financial year.
Game sent out emails to people who had preordered GTA V, me included, saying they will honour Rockstar's request not to ship until the 16th, they also did the same with GTA IV, and honoured it.
Deep Silver didn't care about preorders for SR:IV arriving early, they wanted to get copies out there to get sales in before GTA V was released, everyone knows other games are taking a backseat on Tuesday ;)
@Tom - trying to do that with a game that sells as many RETAIL copies as a GTA does will do nothing but lose sales to people who still live in areas where they can't get broadband. Penalizing them for an issue cased by a distributor isn't fair or smart at the end of the day. Sure, in a perfect world, that unlock mode works perfectly... but I don't even want to know what happens if there's ever a launch day server side issue where "oops" people can't download that game update because you have X million others trying to do the same thing or there's some other issues. I've heard and read of such chaos and I just have to be glad that I can still pop in a game and PLAY it right away or after a mandatory install (which is great for making dinner while waiting through)...
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Greg Wilcox on 17th September 2013 5:38pm
Didn't the console playing crowd just get done with telling Microsoft that they didn't want that right now? It would be abysmal timing to implement that in a single player console game (especially on the 360 version) just after Microsoft polished off the humble pie.