Adult Gaming on the DS: The Chinatown Conundrum

“Chinatown Wars received critical acclaim and is the highest rated DS title of all time,” said Alan Lewis, vice president of corporate communications for Take-Two, which owns Rockstar Games. “In terms of performance, we think it is performing in line with other triple-A games on the platform.”

Lewis points out that the game was only on sale for 19 days in March, adding that the game is the highest unit selling M rated title in its launch month and already the second highest selling M rated title on the DS.

“We are very confident in Chinatown Wars long-term potential for success,” he said. “We think it will have a long life in the market.”

Analysts agree that Chinatown Wars’ potential success will be measured over the long haul, rather than the short one. Though Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter thinks that the early low sales could mean it will be quite awhile before we see another deep game developed for adults on the DS.

“It’s shocking that sales were 89,000 because it is a really well known franchise, a really high rated game,” Pachter said. “There is no way you can say it didn’t do well because people didn’t know about it or it’s bad.”

What that leaves, Pachter says, is evidence that either the DS audience is too young or disinterested in deeper, longer games to play on the DS.

“This is really the first hardcore, mature game for the DS,” he said. “I think there certainly won’t be another for the next two or three years. It will take a bold publisher to put something else like this out there.”

EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich says he wasn’t surprised by Chinatown Wars initial low sales numbers.

“When you release a big DS game like this, it’s for the long term,” he said. “It’s not like an in and out thing, like you would see for the console. With the DS, games have a lot longer legs than any other

Nintendo seems to agree.

“Remember that many games for Nintendo DS have a nontraditional sales pattern,” said Denise Kaigler, Nintendo of America’s vice president of corporate affairs. “The trend is toward ‘evergreen’ games that sell well over an extended period of time instead of in a one-month spike. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for Nintendo DS is a good example. In its first month (November 2007), it sold only 36,000. To date, it has sold through nearly 500,000. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a great game that has received tremendous reviews. We expect that with continued backing, it will follow the same long-tail/evergreen sales route that other top sellers have taken.”

And that’s sort of the point that it seems Rockstar was trying to disprove. The question now is, will Rockstar and other third-party publishers still be willing to wait for long-term sales on future deep, adult games or will they instead move back to the casual and the kiddy for the DS.

“We have and we will continue to support the platform,” Take-Two’s Lewis told me. “We think the mature segment of the DS market is growing.”