GTA Chinatown Wars Sales Nearly 50% of All M-Rated DS Games

The reason is piracy. Honestly I know tons of ppl who pirate DS games. Its so simple and even youngsters pirate. What he says is probably putting it lightly. Most teenagers and older ppl pirate on the DS just like the PSP.

the reason is simple, the game is not 3D like the previous ones

i wouldnt blame piracy blame the fact that you released a mature rated game on a handheld geared for youngsters...... like they said it passed the million mark and holds the market for mature rated games, so 2mil units are mature rated and how many units sold are rated either E10 or below?

Look, people. You can't just come and blame piracy on DS. PSP already claimed that blame a long time ago.

Nintendo , Sony and Microsoft should also be working that piracy will go down , Like U know DVD Format is cheap and it's pirated U should use a new format . Sony managed this (Blue ray) But before PSX and PS2 had most piracy , Only a new format will help Like if they backed Toshiba HD-DVD , then we would have not seen Pirated games on consoles this generation I still think GTA China No's are good though and they should quiet their whining

Funny how they were singing a different tune a year ago, not long after its initial release. Either way, which is worst for the gaming industry, cyber pirates or cyber ninjas? Discuss.

Can't they just be happy that it's selling good god... they have to complain about everything WUHAAA WUHAAA MOMMY MOMMY I CAN'T WIPE MY FANNY WITH 100 DOLLA BILLS ANYMORE I ONLY HAVE 50s WUHAAA WUHAAA!

of course a game called Grand THEFT Auto gets pirated, it's moralistic karma.

lol those who think this game hasn't been pirated much. Just go check out a public torrent site that lists all the public trackers. If you sum up how many people are currently connected it is about 8000 (this is only some sites). So if the game has been out for this long and still getting healthy downloaders how bad was it when the game was new?

I'll attest to knowing more people than I can count on both hands that have pirated this game.

Piracy it's the new excuse... and I don't think it is neither. It's because the game itself.

"the game wouldn't have sold that much more, even without piracy." Wrong... see the gamers interested in Chinatown Wars are in the age range where people KNOW how to pirate games, where the parents who buy their kids Carz and other such crap are not. We can't deny that piracy is a problem. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma: everyone would gain collectively if it wasn't there, but each individual person is much better off pirating.

What loves2splooge said.

Piracy hurts every single release on the DS. I do think that the effect on overall sales is overstated by industry. This is no justification, but piracy tends to hurt the smaller developers more. I am not going to shed any tears for Take Two. I know, I know, slippery slope, but I just can't feel bad for someone moaning about moving 1 million units on a low production cost game.

@scottie, piracy on the DS is easier as there is no firmware updates to block stuff. All you need is a card and their software and bam you done it. It is simple for ANY ONE with an IQ of 70 or higher. In some countries these card readers are sold legally on shelves. PSP requires a bit more of an IQ. Also don't forget Liberty City was one of the games used as an exploit to launch PSP iso early in the PSP hacking life. Anyway, I really hope Nintendo's both next system use a storage format that will make it hard for the pirates like the PS3 bluray has helped Sony.

Isn't Chinatown Wars just 50% of the M Rated games on the DS period?

who wants to play a GTA game as a comic books styled Asian in NYC. Really Cmon. Like at least make it tokyo or something And they're surprised it didnt sell too well. Make a new city godamnit.

"I never heard of another M rated DS game O_O" http://www.esrb.org/ratings/search.jsp This is the list, and it isn't a lot. So there can't be that many M rated sales when there aren't that many big M rated games.

interesting statistic!

I never heard of another M rated DS game O_O I take it they all stank. So which sold more, GTA DS or GTA PSP?

There is a grand total of 10 Mature games on the DS.

If that is true then that's just sad

DS doesn't have many M rated games so its not a huge accomplishment.

hmmm, that's a pretty pointless statistic

50% of M rated DS sales. How sad.

I've seen kids with R4's. So it's not just adults doing it.

Anyway, the big problem with GTA: Chinatown wars is that it didn't look interesting compared to other titles in the franchise like Vice City.

M rated games = hardcore! Being hardcore is all that some people have besides dungeons of dragons pals.

Well at least they are blaming piracy and not Nintendo, it's a nice change.

i don't know whats everyone's obsession with M Rated games.

I'm very proud that Chinatown wars (specially DS version) hits the million mark. The mature audience is not the major part of its users. And most of them have the famous R4 tarjet... Chinatown wasn't bundled too and there aren't any GTA before this... so its a very respectable marc I hate piracy, i'm working on a GAME shop inSpain and so man times teher are people asking us if we sell the R4 tarjet or another... people is incredible!!

so wait, GTA:CW just passed the 1M mark. so in all the years on the market in all of the library the DS has only sold 2M M rated games? just wow.

Honestly I believe Take-Two. I was in some rom site's chat room around the time of Chinatown Wars' release and I swear a gazillion people must have been begging for the anti-piracy fix for CTW so that they could get the game to work on their R4. This game was heavily pirated for sure. 'Core' DS players pirate a shitload. You want to know why the vast majority of DS jrpgs, visual novels, etc. don't sell very well? Well, Take-Two is giving you the answer. Trust me on this. I lurk around those kind of sites (mainly because I have a flash card myself. lol) and from my experience, GTA CTW, niche games (particularly jrpgs but others as well), etc. are very popular with this crowd. Ace Attorney games are pirated to hell on these sites as well. When Ace Attorney Investigations was out, god knows how many people were constantly asking "is the game dumped yet?" or "where can I find a link? PLEASE" on these kind of sites. The PSP gets a bad rap for piracy but the reality is that if you make 'core' games on the DS, it will get pirated to hell. Because the audience for 'core' DS games (males aged 12-34 or whatever it is. You know what I'm talking about) is tech-savvy and knows how to illicitly acquired DS roms for free, what they need to play those roms and how to get those roms to play on their DS.

i never brought the game because its a top-down shooter

There's honestly nothing to be proud of. The only other M DS games I can think of are Dementium, Touch the Dead and Resident Evil: Deadly Silence. And besides, it's f***ing GTA, of course it's going to sell alot.

Like for example, GTA: Liberty/vice city stories sold 3.7 and 6.04 Millions units respectively. It's More than GTA:CW sales combined. Late ports are crap.

GTA:CTW sold crap on psp for the same reason Bioshock 1 sold crap on the ps3. It's because it was a very late port that no one cared about anymore. Bioshock is an awesome game but on sold a fraction of what it would have if it was released simultaneously on the PS3/X360. If GTA:CW was released simultaneously on the PSP/DS, it could easily have sold millions...

IMO, the game received excellent ratings, the only thing i could say is there's no market for a GTA like that on portables, as good as it may be...

>later, GTA:CW sells crap on the PSP, everyone blames piracy no, it's because it's an late 2D GTA game port. 3D GTA games sold great on PSP, no need to remind people that

Every one I know playing on DS and are not kids don't buy their games, they DL games on websites and put them on a card that I don't remember the name. But I know one guy that have bought about 12 games before using the card, so that's more than the average customer... I don't think every sale is lost by a DL just some of them. And like in music, the ones who buy the most are pirates.

I've seen that argument presented by some of the more idiotic trolls, now I see it from a CEO. Lol GTA:CW sell ok on the DS but not as well as other GTA games, everyone blames the DS userbase later, GTA:CW sells crap on the PSP, everyone blames piracy If piracy is the reason, then why were the other PSP GTA games such high sellers? The problem is that they went back to what made GTA games good, instead of staying with what's popular. The 3 best GTA games are 1, 2 and CTW. The three lowest selling are 1, 2 and CTW. :P

The reason Chinatown Wars sales were sub-par is because they neglected the feature that made GTA games fun: 3D. That's why it hasn't sold on the PSP or DS.

To be honest I got this game ''for free'' but I stopped after 10 minutes because it just wasn't as good as other GTA games. It might be good by GTA2's standard but GTA has changed since then and now it is also about the detailed world, strong story telling and conversations. The other PSP GTA games managed to do that better then this game. He shouldn't blame piracy, if all pirates would have paid for this then it would have seriously hurt the GTA series' AAA quality rating. They should have never made a game like GTA for a platform that doesn't meet the standard of games such as GTA.

It's not like there are very many M-rated games on the DS, period, but that's still a respectable accomplishment.

Many of the M-rated public are people with some computer/chipping skills. And the problem with any popular medium is that it has to be easy accessible. It's the dog biting it's own tale.