News: GTA IV Players Frustrated by Gaming Console Freezes -- By Frederick Lane, newsfactor.com Wed Apr 30, 12:29 PM ET
When you release a game that celebrates beatings, shootings, carjackings and other forms of social mayhem, it had better work properly. If the official forums for Grand Theft Auto IV are any indication, the programmers at Take-Two and Rockstar North should avoid lingering in dark alleys for the foreseeable future.
Dozens of disappointed GTA IV players have reported that their gaming consoles have frozen at various points in the game. Most of the reports are from PlayStation 3 owners, but some Xbox 360 units have also been affected.
" GTA4 Freezes all the time., Heeeeelp" is the morose heading of the largest forum thread, with more than 45 separate messages and more than 6,000 views. The thread was started by an Australian gamer on Monday and offers a typical complaint: "I got GTA on Sunday and it freezes and I have to restart the console it happens every hour or so, I thought it may be a dodgy disc, so I took the disc back to the shop and got a new one and almost 40 mins into the game and it froze on me again."
Damage Control
By all accounts, the Rockstar North support group is taking withering fire from angry and frustrated GTA IV buyers. Brian Crecente, senior editor of Kotaku, a major video-game blog and one of the first media outlets to report the freezing problems, spoke to an "obviously unhappy" company representative on Wednesday, but didn't learn anything substantive about possible fixes.
"He ended the call by saying that they really have no idea when a fix will be coming," Crecente wrote, "because they can't figure out what is exactly causing the problem and then once more apologized. 'I feel terrible about this.'"
The challenge for Rockstar North's technical crew is that the problem is somewhat erratic. The bulk of the problems have been reported by owners of the 60GB PlayStation 3, but some 20GB PS3s and some Xbox 360s have also frozen.
Yani Clark, a contributor to the XBoxFamily site, suggested a different solution. "Rockstar, in their very finite wisdom designed the game to have no loading times. That's great, except for the fact that GTA IV now overloads the cache and causes a lock-up (freeze). So now, instead of saving load times and providing a seamless experience, Rockstar has forced some machines to crash while attempting to load from the cache."
Clark said what Rockstar needs to do is release a patch that prevents overloading a game console's RAM. But he questioned whether the company could pull that off. "[Rockstar hasn't] managed to make a game that doesn't freeze in two years. Unless you count the mega epic 'Table Tennis.'"
Possible Share Price Impact?
The potential consequences for Rockstar North and its corporate parent, Take-Two, extend far beyond some frustrated gamers. Take-Two has publicly rejected a purchase offer from rival Electronic Arts , arguing that the offered per-share price was too low.
Although Take-Two clearly expected that the enormous sales success of GTA IV would bolster its case for a higher purchase price, lingering or unresolved technical issues could dent that strategy.
