Rockstar announced the second episode for Grand Theft Auto IV that will follow up the success that the company already experienced with The Lost and Damned which was released earlier this year. The second exclusive add-on will be called “The Ballad of Gay Tony” which will released in early Fall only for the Xbox 360.

The more interesting news is perhaps that Rockstar will be releasing both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony on disc which will be titled “Grand Theft Audio: Episodes from Liberty City” which will appear later this fall exclusively for Xbox 360. Unlike the downloadable content versions of the game, the Grand Theft Audio: Episodes from Liberty City disc will not require a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to play them.

The news of this strategy of bringing the downloadable content out on disc is new, in the fact that it does not require the game, thus it is really a standalone expansion pack that is playable; which creates a new potential revenue stream for Rockstar. It is still thought due to the large size of the expansion add-on for both games that there are a lot of gamers who would like to experience the downloadable episode content, but do not have the disk space to do so, or perhaps they do not have a fast enough Internet connection to make downloading the episodes reasonable.

When Grand Theft Audio: Episodes from Liberty City drops this fall it is expected to retail for $39.99. We have to wonder what kind of sales Rockstar is expecting out of this experiment; we do think that it will sell a number of copies, but it is hard to tell if the sales will set a trend on what we might see from other publishers in this regard in the future.