GTA DLC "would have outsold Killzone"

Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg has said that Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned is "the most successful game add-on content we've ever launched" on Xbox Live.

The exclusive GTAIV expansion, which reviewed well despite a relatively high price point (1600 MSP), "would have outsold Killzone 2" in February if it had been at retail, Greenberg added in an interview with Gamasutra.

Rockstar Games has not released any specific sales figures or projections for Lost and Damned to date, but Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter recently said it was likely to sell 2 million copies by the end of 2009. And Microsoft paid up front for its exclusivity, remember.

Although Lost and Damned is Microsoft's biggest single success in terms of unit downloads, the DLC revolution marches on. Rock Band recently passed 30 million songs downloaded, and on a purely anecdotal level the interest from Eurogamer readers in add-ons like Fallout 3 Operation: Anchorage and the Tomb Raider episodes, based on page stats, has been more considerable than many full-price releases reviewed within a similar period around release.

Elsewhere in his discussion with Gamasutra, Greenberg also puffed out his chest about Xbox 360's February NPD sales figures for the US, which point to a year-on-year increase of over 50 per cent in hardware sales, and once again said that the PS3 business was "declining, it's been described to me as hemorrhaging at retail right now, and it just keeps getting worse".

"What we're finding in our research is that a large portion of the volume we're driving with Xbox 360 purchasers is actually PS2 owners choosing Xbox for the next generation. We're switching people from the PlayStation brand over to the Xbox brand," he claimed.