Joystiq

Rockstar continues its statistical assault, putting down its scientific calculator and giant sacks of money just long enough to share some Grand Theft Auto IV data with us, by way of Microsoft's Gamerscore Blog. First, Microsoft wanted to share some GTA-related Xbox sales data (Europe can't have all the fun, right?): Xbox 360 console sales "went up 54% week-over-week"; retailers say that the Xbox 360 release accounted for more than 60% of all GTA IV sales in the first week; sticking those two together, retailers say that "roughly 40% of new 360 console sales" went out the door with a copy of GTA IV.

Now for the really interesting stuff: Xbox Live stats. We already knew GTA IV took the top spot on Xbox Live (and apparently helped the service break the "1 million concurrent users" milestone), but know we know how: more than 2.3 million people played on Xbox Live, unlocking more than 12 million achievements, and setting "a new record for time played," with your average gamer investing more than four hours in the game's first week.

Without decent info to compare and contrast these numbers with, they're little more than trivia. Regardless, here's our best apples and oranges comparison: in the first nine days after the release of the Call of Duty 4 map pack, that game logged some 30 million hours of play so, if GTA IV had 2.3 million users spending an average of four hours with it in the first week, we're clumsily calculating something like 9.2 million hours versus something like 23.3 prorated hours for CoD4 ... or something. We warned you it was apples and oranges. Now you tell us: how much time did you spend with GTA IV?