14 DAY TRIAL // Grand Theft Auto IV is, according to reviews and sales figures, the best game ever released. When GTA IV was launched, if you remember, it was a complete hysteria, with thousands of people queuing to purchase it, with guys going on vacation, quitting their jobs and God knows what else, just to play it. Yes, it was that big! And one would expect for such a history making title to be always in our minds, souls and... news. However, if you checked the game websites during the past few weeks, you realized something: nobody talks about GTA IV anymore. Rockstar's game died, vanquished, disappeared into thin air and not even the fact that its Xbox 360 DLC was delayed did not manage to bring the masses to life.
Take Halo 3 as an example. Even though Bungie's game is seven months older than GTA IV, it's still a title people keep talking about. Tons of quality videos are made by dedicated fans who find even more and more ways to kill an enemy, to entertain the public, to do something; news reports or features about Halo are still written, things still happen. Up to a point, the same happens with COD 4, the other "top three" game that directly competes against GTA and Halo - not to mention the fact that these exactly two titles are still the most played multiplayer games on the Xbox 360s, and not the "perfect" GTA IV.
So, I am just wondering - why did the new Grand Theft Auto IV die so quick? If you are to check the traffic stats for the official Rockstar website, you'll notice a huge drop (pictured below - click here for the whole details on Alexa). Actually, "huge" is not enough said: it's a gigantic fall to hell and below! Don't all games go to heaven?
How come people seem to be more interested in GTA San Andreas and even Vice City than they are in GTA IV? Rockstar's title is, after all, a game with huge quality and potential. And it has been bought by 11 million people, for God's sake! It should've been a continuous revolution since the game launched - people writing tens of thousands of pages about the secrets they uncovered, about the person who managed to get a 100% in the game and grab the prize promised by the developers (has anybody achieved that? I've heard nothing about it).
And, one of the most important things - where is Rockstar in the equation? They had a perfect, flawless marketing campaign but they stopped immediately after the game got released. Did they achieve enough? 11 million copies, hundreds of millions of dollars, are all these enough to make a company shut up? I doubt that. And I also doubt that GTA IV is really dead. It still exists out there and is waiting for something - I don't know what, though - to be reborn, like the Phoenix. I can still hear its echo somewhere deep inside our souls, waiting for something great to happen to put it up again in the headlines. Because the gaming industry needs to showcase its best title ever more than it did - because companies need to know that we do care about quality products and we're not ready to forget them as soon as the frenzy fades away. Because if we don't care, my friends, we can't ask them to care either. Just think about this and grab the controller. Start playing or start doing something else to bring Niko to life again! Don't let him die so soon.