Previously, Sony, perhaps not coincidentally, signed a deal with Take-Two to bring several parts of the Grand Theft Auto franchise to its consoles first…

Three Grand Theft Auto episodes were first released on the PlayStation 2, and perhaps that’s why Sony’s console has sold over 160 million units (this is an updated figure, which you can see on the PlayStation 30 Years History page, we’ve written about it before). In fact, the PS2 also doubled as a cheap DVD player (it was cheaper than them at first!), but many people still preferred to use Sony’s hardware for gaming rather than as a media player.

Chris Deering, who used to run Sony Computer Entertainment’s European division, told Gamesindustry editor-in-chief Christopher Dring at EGX London that Sony was afraid of Microsoft and had swooped on three Rockstar games to get the PS2’s big-selling Grand Theft Auto episodes first!

“We were worried when we saw the Xbox coming. We knew that exclusivity was the name of the game in a lot of areas, like Sky TV with sports. Just as Christmas was approaching, when Xbox was going to launch, a bunch of us went to our favorite third-party publishers and developers and said, “How would you like a special deal if you keep your next-generation game exclusive to PlayStation for two years?

And one of the deals we made was with Take-Two for the next three Grand Theft Auto games. It wasn’t clear at the time that Grand Theft Auto 3 would be as big as it was because it was a top-down game. It was very fortunate for us. And actually lucky for them because they got a discount on the royalties they paid. These deals are not uncommon in platform industries. Including today with things like social media,” Deering said.

It worked, because while the first two Grand Theft Auto games were top-down, Grand Theft Auto III took the franchise into the third dimension… and the rest is history.

Source: WCCFTech, Gamesindustry