Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars was acclaimed by critics and quickly achieved a GameRankings average of 92 percent, the highest ever on the system. However, the game failed to break 100,000 units in sales its first month and analysts slashed their sales estimates for the game. When asked about the lack of long or short term success for Chinatown Wars, Nintendo of America executive vice president of sales and marketing Cammie Dunaway expressed frustration.
“Certainly there have been mature titles [such as] Resident Evil and the first Call of Duty that have sold over a million units, and with something like GTA, there's great content there,” said Dunaway to MTV’s Multiplayer. “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.”
When asked directly if a lack of marketing had consequences on sales of Chinatown Wars, Dunaway simply responded, “I think they should continue to put marketing support behind it.”
Chinatown Wars is one the biggest head-scratchers of the year when it comes to figuring out why it underperformed. The lack of a “long tail” outlook isn’t a sufficient answer in and of itself because core gamers tend to be better informed and more likely to purchase titles soon after release. Chinatown Wars hasn’t performed any better on the PSP, leaving many to wonder if the game’s top-down camera angle (a throw back to older GTAs) didn’t put off consumers. It’s also likely that Mature titles on the DS have similar hills to clime that Wii games do.
2 Comments
December 10, 2009
Since the Psp port didn't work, it's time to port it to the PS2. And if that doesn't work, um....don't make any more DS GTA games. Problem solved.
December 11, 2009
On reason I left out was the lack of familiarity with the IP. Yes, it was a GTA game, but unlike Liberty City Stories and Vice Cities stories, it wasn't obviously attached to a more familiar sub-brand within the GTA universe.