It started out simple enough. Continuing the urban saga of the sprawling Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto IV's two DLC packs -- The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony -- would encourage players to explore the side-stories of GTAIV's peripheral characters.

However, less-than-stellar sales of the extra content has left many scratching their heads as to the apparent disinterest of GTA players. Take Two's CEO Ben Feder believes it was a case of bad timing. [Josytiq]

Both we and Microsoft believed there was a big market for GTA 4 episodic content and some factors affected their performance.

Both were released significantly after the launch of the core unit and therefore weren’t able to leverage GTA 4’s initial marketing campaign and initial launch fervor.

As both packs were released nearly a year or beyond after the game was launched (10 months for Damned, 18 months for Ballad), Feder might be on to something here.

Remaining optimistic, Feder looked to future DLC releases to re-kindle interest in returning to the Liberty City streets.

There’s very little precedent for this type of episodic content at the price point we offered it. And so we’re confidant that these titles will continue to have a long life just as we’ve seen a long life from all of our other prior GTA releases.