What makes the discount pointless is how little clothing items there are to buy and how much money you get. All Rockstar games have a problem with the player ending up with way too much money with nothing to spend it on but GTA IV has it especially bad. It's just clothes and guns, and you can carry so much ammo on you that you'll never run out on most of them. (I ended up tweaking some ini files to limit the maximum ammo capacity to just a few magazines on each gun to make the game more interesting). You can't buy cars and there's no car customisation outside of taking them to Pay N Spray for a random paintjob. The personal vehicle system (which just involves preventing vehicles from despawning by parking them in parking spots in front of your safehouses) is so undercooked I installed a trainer just so I could customise and spawn my vehicles back when I lost them

That more grounded tone is why I've always loved GTA IV. I love the vibes of the early game where you do jobs for Roman, Little Jacob and fairly low-level Russian mobsters while living in a shitty apartment