GTA: Chinatown Wars jacks more wallets, sells 74K in April

by David Hinkle on May 18th 2009 11:31AM

In its first month of release, GTA: Chinatown Wars managed to only sell 89,000 copies in the US, according to the NPD. Now that the figures for April have come in, Gamasutra reports the game has managed to sell another 74,000 copies. Mind you, we're no mathematicians (well, not all of us), but by our calculations, that means GTA: Chinatown Wars has managed to sell a total of 163,000 copies in the US so far, which is a lot lower than what most analysts predicted the game would sell in its first month.

We guess that South Park bump didn't do the game much good ...

Source

Tags: business, DS, grand-theft-auto, grand-theft-auto-chinatown-wars, gta, gta-chinatown-wars, Nintendo, rockstar, sales

Reader Comments (53)

I owned the game and sold it, it got old pretty fast. GTA just has nothing left to give thats new other than the ram the cop and lose a star thing. Drug running was a snore and really unneeded, and the stages were like a rehash of GTA3 with a new coat of paint. It's a great game for the GTA junkie which I believe I'm just not much of anymore as I found 3 and VC the best and these days Saints Row2 just blows it away with it's new mechanics.

I'm totally not surprised it sold as it has, but it appears to have those legs too with the sales going so far but we'll see in time. Keep in mind though analysts when it comes to games are nearly always wrong so why the hell anyone would listen to them thinking this would bang out a million in no time was a fool.

I do agree with Greendomo just above me there, it's vastly superior to GTA4 as that game was just bad, sorry but it was. That game was so damn slow, so scripted, and well I think they intended to name it Gargantuan Tutorial Assistant 4 as the damn game just wouldn't let you play. You could go hours and get as far as finally being privledged to a bat to lose it, then finally a bit later a basic pistol. GTA is about sandbox, but it's uber linear for a good stretch and it forced lame relationships that would suffer if you didn't often drop what you were doing and tease some idiots neediness to keep them happy. Chinatown Wars thankfully doesn't do this bs as it lacks the whininess, the overkill tutorial, and you can get a piece and pop some idiots in about a minute of walking around.

Let's not forget two things:

1. Those are just the US sales. In Germany for instance, the game skims the Top Ten of several retailers, for instance.

2. Allow me to quote: "Quality scores alone don't seem to be a major driver of sales on the DS, says Divnich -- he says many other DS titles, irrespective of their ESRB ratings, have scored 90 and above on Metacritic and *have never broken 300,000 units in 3 months in North America*." Thus so far, the game is neither a huge success, nor a flop – it's within the average sales of DS games.