GTA's next episode: The Ballad of Gay Tony

The next instalment of Grand Theft Auto is on its way, and like previous Xbox 360 download The Lost and Damned (and DS classic Chinatown Wars), it's set in GTA IV's vibrant, scuzzy Liberty City. Rockstar has unleashed a surprise announcement with The Ballad of Gay Tony coming this autumn for 1,600 Microsoft Points (£13.20).

The character in focus this time is Luis Lopez, an assistant to Gay Tony, aka Tony Prince, Liberty City's premier nightclub entrepreneur. The glitz-addled world could be a little dose of Vice City-style mayhem. According to Rockstar Games founder Sam Houser, you should expect a "focus on high-end night life". And, according to the press release, there'll be "uncertainty about who is real and who is fake in a world in which everyone has a price."

Also announced was the release of both The Lost and Damned and Gay Tony episodes in a single standalone disc-based game called Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City. At $40 (£25), it will cost the same as both DLC (downloadable content) episodes, plus it will have a physical disc and box, and will not require GTA IV to dig into its seedy pleasures.

There's no word on whether the Episodes disc will be available for PlayStation 3. Xbox 360 currently has exclusivity on GTA IV's DLC, but that deal may expire -- or using a physical disc may somehow get round it.

Either way, those two eps almost add up to a GTA IV sequel. Perhaps this really is the future of videogame publishing: build a world once and populate it many times over. On a side note, we wonder if this morsel of pre-E3 info is a sign of what's in store at the industry expo. Will the flatlining economy equal more DLC and less standalone content? We shall see soon enough.