Sony & Rockstar: Best Of Friends Again?

As you will be aware, Sony lost out big time on Rockstar’s latest incarnation Grand Theft Auto 4, with Microsoft shelling out $50,000,000 for exclusive content on the game, for release only on Xbox Live. But fear not PS3 users, Jack Tretton SCEA President has let slip in an interview that Rockstar have signed a deal with Sony to bring their next big franchise to the Sony PS3 exclusively, not only additional content, but the whole game!

“Rockstar really wanted to make a game that you can truly only do on PS3, harnessing the power of CELL and Blu-ray disc and this deal lets them do just that.. This is really a win-win situation for both companies.”

Rockstar have made a non disclosure agreement with Sony and will not mention the agreement, the deal or the game in question.

I personally think that Sony will have dipped into its large back pocket to secure this deal, Rockstar / Take Two have been business chums for years, but lets be honest business is business, and if Microsoft will shell out $50M for some downloads, what the hell did sony shell out for a complete game for its poorly selling console. The only other questions that remain are this:

1. what will the game be? Rockstar have made many games ranging from the recently banned everywhere “Manhunt” to “Ping Pong”, & “Red Dead Revolver”, many of those not selling well at all.

2. By the time Rockstar have made a new franchise, will theyre be a PS3 around to play it on? this xmas is very important to Sony, even though they dont believe it to be, from all the financial reports floating around Sony is losing money hand over fist on its latest beast, it actually makes a loss on every console due to manufacturing costs, and the only reason they made a profit this year is due to their digital camera wing of its business, one of the finance people over at Sony was strangely happy that they hadn’t sold more consoles, because that would have caused a larger financial void, due to console cost. :

“[The PS3] sales figure was somewhat weaker than our target but we still believe that the main battle is still ahead of us, Sales of the PS3 have risen but we booked losses due to our strategic decision to price it below the (production) cost,” he continued. “Actually, because the number of units sold was not as high as we hoped, the loss was better than our original expectation.” – Chief Financial Officer @ Sony “Nobuyuki Oneda”

Odd