It seems everyone missed a bit of news that broke last week regarding downloadable content for GTA IV on the Xbox 360. As you were probably aware, a tentative release date for the DLC was before the end of 2008. According to the Gamespot article that brought this up, Microsoft said last month that the content would be ready before December 31 - nothing like leaving things til the last minute, though I'm not sure they meant actually releasing it then. Rockstar's Creative VP Dan Houser recently gave an interview to Variety, and the following is an excerpt from that, regarding the downloadable content.

Variety: On another topic, I have to ask you about the "GTA IV" downloadable content you're doing. Do you still expect that to come out this year?

DH: I'm not sure. It's going well. But we don’t know a date. We hope to be announcing that in the next few weeks. We're still figuring out a few things. We're more focused on quality than dates, always have been. But the development is going really good. It's shaping up to be something we're very proud of. That was our goal

Variety: Do you think you'll talk at all about what the DLC will be and how it will fit into "GTA IV's" story?

DH: We want to give people a rough idea so their expectations are roughly in line. We don't want them to imagine it's this enormous thing that it can never be...

Doing a big digital launch is something we've never done before. It's virgin territory, but at the same time, we feel very exposed because there's no case history. No one ever came out with major DLC for a major game like this before.

It's new territory for everybody. We're making it up a little bit as we go along. That's always fun, but it makes you nervous.

Good to hear they're focused on quality, which is always the case with Rockstar. The main point of the interview is discussing GTA IV's release in Japan, if you're interested (and it is actually quite interesting reading about the challenges R* face when releasing the GTA games there) you can read it in full over at Variety.