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Sales of the Nintendo DS version of incredible open world gangster game Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars are “frustrating”, according to Nintendo.
In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, reported by Kotaku, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of sales and marketing Cammie Dunaway said the game, developed by acclaimed UK studio Rockstar Leeds, needs continued marketing support.
She said: “It’s frustrating, quite frankly. Certainly there have been mature titles – Resident Evil, the first Call of Duty – that have sold over a million units and with something like GTA, there’s great content there. We do think it’ll have a long tail and we’ve seen that with a lot of titles across all genres on the DS platform that consumers continue to discover them.
“But part of what’s needed is you have to continue to put marketing support behind these titles. It’s one of the things we’ve learned over the past few years. The old dynamic of throw it on TV for a few weeks and forget it isn’t going to work, because new consumers are coming in all the time.”
While the mature and violent Chinatown Wars is undoubtedly a wonderful game, sales haven’t met expectations
In April, EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich estimated that the game sold only 200,000 units in March in the US, a figure much lower than industry expectations.
To put Chinatown Wars’ sales into perspective, previous GTA titles for the PSP have sold in excess of one million units over their lifetime.
Can mature and violent games sell on the Nintendo DS? Are Chinatwon Wars’ poor sales simply down to marketing? Let us know in the comments section below.
