'Grand Theft Auto IV' launches amid great expectation

With Take-Two now reportedly measuring out global preorder demand at 6 million units -- or $400m (£200m) -- it has become a forgone conclusion that Grand Theft Auto IV will do quite well for itself when it launches today.

Expectations were high when Microsoft and Bungie released Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 on 25 September. It was only mildly surprising, then, when Microsoft proclaimed a day after launch that the final installment in Halo's story arc, begun in 2001 on the original Xbox, had set North American entertainment sales records, selling some $170m (£86m) in product within 24 hours. Not a bad tally, considering it had unseated summer box-office spectacle Spider-man 3's record-setting $151m domestic opening-weekend haul from earlier in the year.

Bungie wasn't given long to bask in its unequivocal success before analysts began to balk at Halo 3's feat. Within two weeks of Microsoft's announcement, Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey was postulating that Bungie would soon find its sales crown swiped by the criminal masterminds at Rockstar Games.

Were Grand Theft Auto IV to land a similarly eye-popping attachment rate on par with Halo 3's -- at the time, in excess of 40 per cent -- he conjectured, the cross-platform status of the game could spike first-week unit shipments to 9.5 million worldwide, or $466m in sales. Those figures would constitute a significant premium over Halo 3's reported 5 million-unit, $300m international opening-week debut.

"There is no question that GTA will be huge," Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter told CNET.co.uk's sister site GameSpot. "I think that the game will sell 11 to 13 million copies by calendar year end, with probably 4 million the first week and 6 million the first full month."

While sales will initially favor the Xbox 360 edition of the game at a rate of three-to-two, Pachter predicted that as Sony's console continues to gain momentum, game sales will even out toward the end of the year to a roughly even split. By year's end, Pachter estimates 5 to 6 million PS3 owners will have picked up the game, yielding an attachment rate of 35 per cent, and 6 to 7 million units headed to the Xbox 360 gamers, a 30 per cent attach rate.