For those of us already enjoying Rockstar's very excellent Grand Theft Auto IV for the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, here's some more news about the multiplatform war: it seems that, according to GameStop's stats on the first week sales of the massive sandbox game, the Xbox 360 version has been outselling the PS3 version at nearly a 2 to 1 ratio. This is surprising, considering that the Grand Theft Auto series has been strongly identified with the PlayStation brand. What does this mean, then?

For Xbox director of product management Aaron Greenberg, this means good news. His e-mail statement to N-Gai Croal's Level-Up blog:

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.

Peter Dille, senior VP of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), however, has another take on it:

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.

Certainly some fighting words coming from both sides. How about you, dear reader? Do you think we should really base a game's success on just sales, or how it actually offered an entirely new experience to the people who played it? Updates as we get them, and you can let us know what you think through the comments below.

Buy: [ GTA IV (PS3) ]
Buy: [ GTA IV (Xbox 360) ]