PSP World

Will Low Sales of Chinatown Wars Encourage More PSP GTA?

Rockstar surprised everyone when they announced that their next installment in the Grand Theft Auto series, Chinatown Wars, would appear on the Nintendo DS. Recent sales figures for March 2008 suggest that their gamble has not paid off as anticipated. GTA: Chinatown Wars only managed to sell 88,704 copies in North America last month, not even earning it a place in the top ten chart. This is highly unusual for a Rockstar release, particularly one as hyped as Chinatown Wars. The game features a top-down version of Liberty City more in keeping with classic GTA games than with the more recent 3D episodes. The emphasis is on action and organized crime, rather than on story.

By all accounts, the game is also superb: it is the top-rated Nintendo DS title on Metacritic, with an overall review score of 94%. So what went wrong? It could be that Rockstar simply chose the wrong platform for this release, and overestimated the number of “hardcore” gamers who were willing to shell out for a 2D game on the DS. Even we were surprised that the game sold so poorly, after all, there are more than 100 million Nintendo DS systems in the world!

If Rockstar and Take Two are paying attention, the message that these desultory sales have to be sending them is that the Nintendo handheld was simply the wrong platform for this ambitious release. We expect Rockstar to do one of two things with their next handheld GTA title: either publish the third and final San Andreas Stories on the PSP, or re-release Chinatown Wars to take advantage of the touch screen on the rumored PSP 2. Both of those options sound great to us.

Chintown Wars on the PSP? Not as crazy as it originally seemed.