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Nintendo's Dunaway: Chinatown Wars Sales 'Frustrating', New Marketing Approaches Needed
by Leigh Alexander [PC, Console/PC]
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December 10, 2009
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The DS debut of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars drew particular attention earlier this year. The issue? Its modest sales performance alongside almost unprecedentedly high review scores suggested a lack of opportunity for M-rated games on the platform -- despite the DS's record-breaking userbase.
At the time, Nintendo said the game's performance was "in line" with other AAA titles on its platforms, and said that some games that don't see massive debuts go on to accumulate significant unit sales steadily over their lifetimes.
New comments from Nintendo of America executive VP of sales and marketing Cammie Dunaway, however, now suggest the company feels Rockstar and publisher Take-Two could have benefited from more marketing support for the title.
"It's frustrating, quite frankly," she says of Chinatown Wars' relatively lackluster unit sales, speaking in a video interview with MTV first transcribed by consumer weblog Kotaku.
Nor is Chinatown Wars' performance necessarily a referendum on the potential for mature content on the platform, she says. "Certainly there have been mature titles - Resident Evil, the first Call of Duty - that have sold over a million units, and with something like GTA, there's great content there," she says.
"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," Dunaway continues. "But part of what's needed is you have to continue to put marketing support behind these titles."
She says Nintendo has learned crucial lessons in marketing itself 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," Dunaway warns.
Analysts forecast a conservative 200,000-unit debut month for Chinatown Wars -- which surprised industry watchers by moving only 89,000 units in its first few days. In its second month, it sold 74,000 units, suggesting some merit to the "slow and steady" sales model for a platform dominated by more casual users who may not necessarily rush to buy on launch dates.
At the time, Cowen group analyst Doug Creutz said the game's struggle couldn't be pinned squarely on the publisher, and that it was "indicative of the difficulties inherent in the Nintendo market for third party products and not due to any misexecution on Take-Two's part."
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I also think the handheld market (DS/PSP) gamers are getting a little irked by having the same title show up on the iPhone 6 months to a year later for $5-10. Latest example, Beaterator - $40 on PSP, $5 on iPhone (and only about 2 months later).
Part of what hurt GTA: VCS stories on the PSP was that people knew it was coming to the PS2 in a few months for $30 less. While I doubt there is as much overlap between the iPhone and DS/PSP owners as PSP/PS2 owners, it pretty much is the same market (portable gaming).
" 80% of DS owners are between 8 and 16 years of age" http://www.itfacts.biz/80-of-nintendo-ds-owners-are-8-16-years-old/9319
As for GTA sales on the PS and Xbox, the content of the game matches well with the average age of Ps/Xbox owners.
The game is fun and has a lot of content that you would expect in a GTA game , but the appeal is much less. I like the game a lot but I don't like the top down view.
(It's also debatable as to whether or not the long-tail principle can be applied to developers and publishers: the entire point is that it involves a small number of sales of a large number of items, rather than large sales of a few items). It only really makes sense for marketplaces like Amazon - and even then, more recent studies have indicated that their revenue from LT sales is minimal)
However, there may be something more to this tale: a quick glance at the wikipedia page for Chinatown Wars throws up a note that the PSP version of GTA:CW didn't chart at all in it's first month of release. Perhaps people just don't want in-depth open-world gameplay on a handheld?
The games you list are big Nintendo franchises which NoA has been releasing for years. Would you expect a strong marketing campaign for New Super Mario Bros Wii? Not really. And still NoA had strong marketing on those titles. I still see the occasional Mario Kart commercial. Also, I see ads in mags all the time. Plus online. EA does well enough on its sport franchises that you don't see much marketing for them specific to DS/Wii and yet they do OK, well OK enough that they keep developing new yearly versions.
In this case I don't think more marketing could have helped Chinatown Wars much. I personally didn't buy it cuz I wasn't sure how much fun it will be based on Rockstar's last few releases and I can't afford in this recession to just buy a game unless I'm pretty sure it will be worth my while, and with CW I'm not sure.