Im dissapointed to say the least.
It appears that Rockstar has no intentions of releasing GTA 4 for the PC.
IS the code for the X-Box 360 really so much different that they cannot code for both the X-Box 360, and the PC simultaniously using the same code?
If they can then whats going on?
Did Rockstar make a deal with Microsoft and Sony to make the game exclusive to only those two platforms, and if so wouldnt that limit their sales, considering all the loyal GTA PC gamers?
I know I am very unhappy considering GTA is one of my favorite game titles of all time.
Do they plan to port the game to PC at a later date, if so how long do we have to wait?
If they do not release it on PC then I guess my days of lawlessness, disorder and chaos are over, because Although I love gaming I refuse to buy a console, I am a PC guy through and through.
Sad are the days without GTA.

Sincerely
A disgruntled gamer.

How can you actually seriously say the GTA games are your "favorite game titles of all time" and not know anything about their release cycles?

No GTA game since GTA3 has been simultaneously released on console and PC platforms. It does NOT happen. They release the console version, and then a year or two later the PC version is released.

Seriously though, how can you call yourself a "big fan" and not know that?

One of reasons they never get my money because i dont want play 3 years old games.

I would much rather buy an 8800GTS than a PS3 or 360 for GTA4.

edit: on the other hand, i'd rather buy a PS3 for Gran Turismo 5 and MGS4

Hey, I'm a gamer too but I have to go with my studies in finance and disagree.

Game devellopers are not creating games because games are fun to play... regardless or the platform. They create games to make money and make a good profit.

Hence, as most of you know, PC suffers from illegal downloads/cracked game and the consumers get the product for free...actually what I mean is the producer does not get monetary exchange from these pirated products. Solution? Consoles...which is less subject to piracy.

Yes, it use to be about the exclusive right to have a game to a console and use to be the battle of which console has better games but you'll notice a lot more cross-platform games in the last year. Because it is more profitable to sell on both consoles right now. You'll also notice a trend for PC games is massive multiplayer games because it is easier for publishers to avoid fraud if you have to login to a server to play under your license agreement.

So, from a business point of view, to make as much profit as possible, you almost have to go with consoles. On the other hand, there is still a huge market in PC gaming... so it is in the publishers' best interest to cross platforms and sell in multiple markets...unless Microsoft and/or Sony make an even better proposal of purchasing exclusive rights to their platform.

As much as people love to download "free" pirated games, it hurts the PC industry a lot...and this is one of the consequences. Buy your PC games and you shall find more publishers showing interest in PC games...perhaps even launching them at the same time as consoles but I doubt people will change overnight.

Nota: Fraud is one of the main problems but exclusive right is another big reason of course. Microsoft and/or Sony pay huge amounts of money to publishers to get their rights. They also get a share of each game being sold and is once again much more profitable than the equivalent of the PC industry.

Alex the PC Gamer, saying that the PC is the platform with the most pirated games is not true.
Do you know that EVERY SINGLE GAME for the X360, Wii, Xbox, PS2, PSP, and DS is shared online (not to mention the older consoles)? Sometimes even pre-release? Do you know how many people download the games for said consoles?
I can tell you right now, the two platforms that suffer from piracy the most are the PS2 and the X360, and not the PC. It is so easy nowadays to get almost any console cracked, and it's even easier to figure out where to get the games for free.
So the argument that the PC is easier to pirate for is not true, IMO.
All games for all the current platforms (except the PS3 which hasn't been cracked... yet) are easily cracked, copied and shared.

I'll agree about console games being pirated increasingly in the last 2-3 years.

Piracy is a factor under many when publishers decide on which consoles to port the game to and is not limited to this particular factor. However, the PC platform is the most affected by piracy, unfortunately.

When publisher study the market, they have to please both the gamer and the purchaser as they are not always ONE.

Hence, would explain the hype of many big titles such as Halo and similar games where the publisher proves to the gamer that the game is extremely fun to play, but will target their selling advertising campaign to parents or adults that can usually better afford such product.

Numbers change every quarter. So I won't post numbers but I have researched the subject many times.

Krisboro, I'm glad you purchase you games. Publishers do not entirely look at piracy and which platform is more affected but it does carry a lot of weight in their decision matrix.

Publishers start by figuring out the demand for a prototype product (i.e. Rainbow Six 2). They have a few different ways to identify the demand for such products and then they weight the profit (costs - revenue = profit .....in general).

Now, there's a lot more to this. But piracy plays a big role in the "revenue" area. Other parts of "revenue" are Exclusive rights that Microsoft or Sony would pay for such products, etc.

Or you could get a decent computer with a nice 24" monitor and see what you are missing. Most PC gamers will stay PC gamers, like myself. After I started building my own PC I saw the uselessness in consoles and saw a huge quality difference in games on the PC as compared to a console.

And yes all console gaming owes PCs big time considering it is PC gaming that continually pushes the envelope for hardware manufactuers to get better.

To the OP, don't worry. R* wont blow PCs off. They usually release the console version first and we will actually probably get it in about 6 months to a year not 1 year to 2 years.

I am excited about GTAIV too since I love Liberty City. Plus think of it this way. It gives R* time to tweak it and fix all the problems console games are stuck with cuz they can't do patches/updates. That is unless they buy a newer version of the same game thus paying more. Hehe.

How many of you have NEVER pirated a piece of software? Be it office app, Windows, game, music? In my opinion, this is like a guy saying he never beat his meat. I freely admit, I was once a contributer to the problem(primarily due to financial reasons, still its no excuse and I think at the time I thought like anyone else that it really didnt matter) Anyway to the point, I am a software developer(looking back now, ironic i know) I still wouldnt even bother with the hassle of doing what it takes to pirate console games. Have you seen kids these days? They pop out with a cat 5 port in their forehead. I would say from 8 years old and up a kid is capable of doing whats necessary to pirate a PC game, this is the problem. I know you would like to think its not easier to pirate a PC game, but it is, especially since in my shadowed history all you have to do is search for the game via the file sharing program of your choice, click and wait, most come pre packaged with a crack. You can't really get much easier than that.

Anyway since it is so easy (I dont know how you could argue against it being easy, the actual cracking (work) is done for the user), any PC gamer with no money and no sense(I include my former self in this) is gonna download games. Then some may argue, well they wouldnt have bought the games anyway, in the literal sense that may be true, but dontcha think they would definitely be on their christmas/b-day list?

Now how many of you have pirated a (PS3, 360) title?
I had a chipped Ps1 and thats where it stopped, at that time it was easy enough to go to my local gameshop and they would mod it. Although my intent for the modding was to play japanese imports, I only later discovered its use in playing burned games.

I have heard a rumor of a PC release date somewhere around oct 08, If this is correct it would actually make it one of the shorter waits for a GTA game since the series went 3D.

The very old one where DK steals Peach and Mario goes to save her by jumping over barrels and such. But truth be told, Mario stems from much farther back than DK. He and Luigi were in a game where they had to move bricks around. It was a Pocket Watch game.

I will research it and see if I can find a definattive date which GTA IV will hit the PC. I am sure it will though. And probably will have extra content too.

You sure do like the smell of your own farts, don't you? It's people like you who give us in the PC gaming population a bad name. Anyone who doesn't play their games on a PC must be retarded, right? God forbid people not wanting to spend hundreds more, and countless hours trying to get their game to run properly. While I personally don't mind tweaking games or upgrading hardware, I also enjoy playing games on the consoles as well. I hope you have fun with all of those great PC exclusives coming out this year...oh...well, there's always 2009 right?

Look at the other gta games 6months after ps2 launch it came out for PC, so why would that change now?

This is best line from this entire thread! Who cares about GTA VIXVX, it will be hear soon enough, but please people learn to use sPelE ChkcE.

Cuz the devs of consoles want your life to be a living hell for FPS games. Even with keyboard and mouse a PC will still have the best graphics and abilities for the games.

Piracy?maybe true..SORY OOT in my country 1 DVD Pc Games only $ 1,5,cheapy yeah?n 1 DVD XBOx360 only $ 4...

I think Rockstar are trying to please everyone by releasing for consoles a few months before PC's.

Imagine if they released for consoles and PC at the same time. Console users would feel silly because their version of the game is twice as expensive and looks half as good as the PC version. So, a large part of their market is unhappy.

If they release it 6 months down the line, the PC version is still superior, has a bit more tweaking time, can eliminate any issues/bugs/etc that are discovered by the console guinea pigs, so PC users will still be happy, but the console users can say that they didn't have to wait and the PC version only looks better because new hardware came out or whatever other excuses they feel they need to make. So, everyone is happy!

Well, it kinda makes sense at least.

My first post here. I had to sign up just because of this thread. So, with that said. First off there are no real numbers on piracy (unless you are the RIAA or Microsoft), and if it has effected the consumers choice in buying any thing. It's just impossible to find out if every person that downloaded something used it over buying the real deal. Thus never paying a dime. Just can't be done. An anonymous survey would do it, but then you have a large number of people that will not take it so the numbers would be incorrect.

Second, yes piracy for the PC technically would be bigger because PC just has more options. More software = more things to be pirated = larger stash of pirated stuff. Now does it matter. NO! Because there is no real facts or numbers to base any thing in to make a definitive statement. SO, you end up with people arguing around in circles.

Is piracy the reason of the wait in porting GTA from console to PC? No way. Porting code form one platform to another can be quite a pain in the butt particularly in the case of Console ported to PC. PC, X360, and PS3 while all built on variations of the same idea, they all have their quirks, and enough of them to call for caution. The biggest reason companies send out the console versions first (most of the time) is because they take more time to develop, and thus become top of the priority list. That way they have more time to finalize the product with in the aloted time frame. With the console version on the shelf, and running smooth the company is now making back the money they spent to put out that title. Eventually they look at it, and decide if its worth porting to the PC or not. Most companies just opt. not to. Not to mention the fact that good companies always put more in the PC version any way.

Lastly, will we see GTA 4 on PC? I hope so. It the reason I found this thread in the first place. and just like every one else said, it would probably be a year, but have better visuals with more content.

PC's aren't POWERFUL enough, b3n?????

No console in history or future will EVERRRRRRRRRRRR out-power a PC in overall graphics capabilities! Reason being- they are stuck with their final hardware lineup. There is no upgrade. You can't hot-swap video or CPU components on a console. PC's constantly evolve!

Granted, no console game will ever lag, but that's because the software is made to run directly with a specific kind of hardware. On the computer its another story due to all the different components and software. It takes a lot more brain-power to make a PC game.

Never seen a console lag? I don't think you've played enough games. Sure, the old consoles didn't lag (i.e., 8- and 16-bit systems). Maybe even the PS and PS2 didn't lag, but I was more entrenched in PC gaming during those years. But the Xbox and 360? I've seen plenty of lag on both. Pretty sad, actually, considering the oft-mentioned hardware finality of consoles...

My Sega Genesis will lag and my N64 on certain games in certain parts.

The reason GTA IV won't release on the PC as there's simply no money in the platform. The PS3 and 360 version combined sold an estimated 4.2 million copies worldwide on launch day.

No money in the platform? What a load of crap. Retail sales may be down, but that's only because the PC games market is becoming more about online distribution. PC games sales are actually rising thanks to online distibution and the added protection against piracy that it brings (Steam anyone?). Anyway, even though the PS3 and XBox 360 versions have been released already, there are a huge ammount of PC gamers that will wait for the PC release and will avoid the console Beta versions. Rockstar can easily make far more money from PC sales than they will need to spend making it workable on a PC. They want to make a profit and I'd imagine, if they have any sense, that they don't want to alienate a large proportion of their consumer base.

Also, imagine if it had been released for the PC and consoles simultaneously. That day one figure would have been far higher and some of the PS3 and Xbox sales would never have happened as any gamer with a half decent rig would have bought it for their PC instead. I'm sure alot of the current sales are PC gamers who either don't want to wait or have bought into the BS that console fanboys spout about it never coming to a PC.

Dare I say about 6 months?