Mobile Entertainment

That's six million units shifted globally in seven days (3.6 million on day one alone). Take Two reckons that makes GTA IV the most lucrative entertainment launch of all time – dwarfing best-ever releases in music, video and literature.

The previous biggest entertainment launch week was that of cinema blockbuster Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End (2007), which took $404 million at the box office.

If you buy into the hype, the movie industry in particular is supposed to be quaking in its now small-time boots. Would new releases like Iron Man be able to hold their own as testosterone-fuelled 18-35 year-olds (and probably a good few under-age gamers to boot) stumped up forty of their hard-earned English pounds for GTA IV?

That's still up for debate. Looking at the UK Box office, Iron Man took £5.5 million last week. That's less than other recent blockbusters like I Am Legend (£11 million) and Spider-man 3 (£11.8 million), but that could be a lot to do with the sun being out last week and Iron Man not exactly being in the upper echelons of super hero-dom.

But how does mobile entertainment stack up against these kinds of numbers? Well, we're sadly not yet at the stage where we can see figures that show if ringtone or mobile game sales dropped off due to GTA IV (not publicly at least - let us know if you can!).

The aggregate numbers make for interesting reading, however. Regulator PhonepayPlus puts the value of the UK mobile content market at £350 million for 2007.

Official figures pin the UK box office at £904 million, DVD sales at £2.2 billion, West End Theatres at £470 million and the music industry at £1.8 billion. Games were the star performer, generating £1.5 billion (up a bumper 25 per cent).

So that £350 million from mobile content stacks up pretty well against the others considering the still emergent nature of the sector. Even better, our industry is still undoubtedly growing, while the same cannot be said for all the others.

Moreover, it's perhaps unfair to even be comparing mobile content to other entertainment sectors as it's arguably a part of all of them. What a great opportunity we have.

But more to the point, why the hell isn't there a GTA mobile game?!