It would have been nice if this article could have given us the actual sales number for Chinatown Wars. We can't really understand what this means buy simply stating the 90K figure for the first month. A little more effort by the author would be appreciated.

And I wonder what people say about the PSP, as this game was also released there. Last I heard it sold much less than its DS counterpart.
And what about the IPhone? How did the sales have been there? Disappointing as well?

Perhaps it is due to the game itself? nah, I am talking crazy now, it can't be... Oh, the irony.

50% of all mature rated DS games is impressive. I hope there is a follow-up article with charts and numbers of this and the games that made up the other 50%. This game has been plagued by it's 90k premiere sales in every single article I've red (No doubt due to all the analyst jumping on it). DS games typically see longer minimal sales cycles rather then a shorter maximum pay-off cycle from what I've seen. This news seems to be further proof of that.

Steve - 'more effort' won't help with lifetime sales, I'm afraid, since only Rockstar and NPD know, and they aren't saying. I do wonder what 50% of the total actually means. There are only 10 M-rated DS games, according to the ESRB, and they are as follows:

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Atlus USA, Inc. Mature Blood, Fantasy Violence, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes Nintendo DS
This is a role-playing game in which players assume the role of a soldier who, along with an elite squad, investigates an ever-expanding region called "Schwarzwelt." This mysterious region is an "other dimension" teeming with demons that want [More...]
Dementium II Southpeak Games Mature Blood and Gore, Violence Nintendo DS
This is a survival-horror game in which players assume the role of an inmate inside a psychiatric hospital. Players will lapse into an alternate reality (called "hell mode"), where the environment becomes twisted, covered in blood, and populated [More...]
Crime Scene Southpeak Games Mature Blood, Drug Reference, Violence Nintendo DS
This is an adventure game in which players assume the role of a forensics detective who is sent to investigate murders and suicides. Players search crime scenes for clues, process evidence in a lab, and interview suspects. Forensics-based mini-games [More...]
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Rockstar Games Mature Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence Nintendo DS
This is an "open-world" action game in which players assume the role of Huang Lee, a triad gang member who must recover a stolen item and gain revenge in the fictional setting of Liberty City. Presented from an overhead perspective, the game [More...]
C.O.R.E. Graffiti Entertainment Mature Blood and Gore, Violence Nintendo DS
C.O.R.E is a futuristic first person shooter in which players assume the role of a space marine who battles inside a facility overrun by alien forces. Characters use a variety of firearms (pistols, shotguns, assault rifles) to combat both [More...]
theresia Aksys Games Localization, Inc. Mature Blood, Strong Language, Violence Nintendo DS
theresia is an adventure-horror game set amidst a strange mystery surrounding the death of the central character's mother. Most violence in the game isn't performed by the player, but rather shown in cutscenes and read from diaries. Cutscenes [More...]
Ultimate Mortal Kombat Midway Amusement Games LLC Mature Blood and Gore, Intense Violence Nintendo DS
Dementium: The Ward Renegade Kid LLC Mature Blood and Gore, Violence Nintendo DS
Touch the Dead Eidos Interactive Mature Blood and Gore, Violence Nintendo DS
Resident Evil Deadly Silence CAPCOM Mature Blood and Gore, Intense Violence Nintendo DS

I agree with Steve and David about this article needing more detail, since it kind of just sounds like a news snippet.

However, we can do some reasonable guesses and get some numbers out of them.

1) We know that Chinatown Wars hit the one-million mark a few months ago.
2) We know that it represents 50% of total M-rated sales.
3) We know there are 9 released M-rated titles on the DS.

Therefore:

a) The total sales of M-rated software would be around 2 million copies.
b) The average number of sales for non-GTACW titles is 1 million / 8, or around 125,000 copies each.

Of course, we cannot figure out from these numbers the exact sales numbers of those 8 other games, since 120,000 is just an average, but I'm sure some good journalism could ferret them out.

Steve,

Yes, it would be nice, but those figures are not available.

Carl,

I'm not sure what the actual implication of "news snippet" is. Also, we don't know that Chinatown Wars hit the one million mark. Do you have a source on that? (VGChartz is not a legitimate sales figure source.)

Also, "good journalism" could probably not ferret out the sale numbers of those eight games. That information is not public. Theoretically it would be possible to contact every single publisher individually and try to convince them to, for some reason, share sales figures for their old and probably commercially unimpressive games, but they would nave no incentive to do so. Even if they did (which they wouldn't), it would likely result in a fairly incidental news story being weeks out of date by the time it was actually published.

Chris

I'd love to know on what basis you've established VGChartz as bunk? Because it doesn't always match NPD's numbers exactly (who incidentally also extrapolate retail, including Walmart)? And since NPD are paid for their services they must be right? Because one or two devs said they were 30% out? Their figures may be out (particularly for low selling software), but in comparison with other sources (when the competing data's actually available) we know they aren't orders of magnitude out, and as such provide a useful approximate gauge of performance.

Since VGChartz is the ONLY publicly available source for practically all consumer sales data, and since they actually disclose their guestimation methodology (more or less), I say flat out discounting their data is ignorant, and any reasonable analysis of the market not dependant on paying a US only analytics group under strict NDA would at the very least use all available data with one eye on the well established caveats of reliability. Even if it were a big rip off that stole figures from all the other sources, at the very least it can be used as a meta-tool - and yes, several industries do use metacritic as a decision making metric. VGChartz should not be flat out ignored.

Chris,

I define a news snippet as something posted as a news post that contains only one piece of new information in it, does not contain analysis of that information, and/or does not differ in substance from a press release.

I apologize if my post sounded harsh, but I called it a news snippet because there was very little new content in it, and the only other piece of relevant information ("the game sold a little less than 90,000 units in its first month in the U.S") is somewhat irrelevant because it gives little information about the total number of sales. For example, if that information was important, then one would have to compare it to first-week sales of a number of other games. But it would look weird to somebody who went to Gamasutra yesterday and saw the news report about Just Dance hitting two million sales recently. If they had a way of finding out first-week sales of Just Dance and discovered it had less than 20,000 sales in its first week, what would that person think? Would that person believe that GTACW sold 4.5x as many units in its first week, so it must have sold 4.5 * 2mil = 9 million copies? (Which would probably be wrong!) First-week sales *might* reflect total sales, but it is not a given.

Yes, I used VGChartz as my source, and I recognize that it is not considered a 'legitimate' sales source by journalists, but I don't have the money it takes to buy the NPD surveys. I rely on news agencies to have such resources so I can use *them* as legitimate sources. Perhaps I misunderstand how NPD works? Are news agencies unable to get legitimate sales figures from NPD? If so, why? Is NPD not tracking weekly sales figures for games not in, say, the top 20 in US sales? (These are not attacks; I'm genuinely curious about what journalists have access to. Please answer...)

Carl, NPD will sometimes give certain information away to journalists if they ask, but by and large it is a pay service. One of the things they won't do is lifetime sales of specific titles, or even ranked data for monthly sales most times. This is because they subsist on the sale of this information and it wouldn't behoove them to give the most interesting bits away for free. Whenever you see those actual numbers, it's either because they're feeling benevolent and have given a bit away for free, or someone has leaked information their company has paid for on neogaf. Or, because the company that owns the title has reached a milestone and decided to reveal it. It should also be noted that agreements with NPD dictate that you not share the information you have purchased, unless it's for your own titles. That's why Ben Feder's statement is significant - he has access to that data, and while I suppose he could be lying, it's rather unlikely.

VGChartz stats are very extrapolated and based on guesswork...they don't have the actual sales data and are much more like analyst projections. They have a system, but it's not based on real, actual data, so that's why most journalists don't like to use it. We've looked into it and found it to be really unsatisfactory against real numbers obtained from the companies themselves.

@ Carl & Merc

VGChartz has always the problem, that they give out numbers for territories, were no numbers are available to anyone, but the manufacturer of the games. There is now tracking of sales for europe, so VGChartz numbers must be guesses here.

I've been following VGChartz for months now and I think they actually do a very good job and are fairly accurate overall.

@ Ken
How can you tell, if they are accurate, when it comes to european sales figures?

@Brandon: I spoke to David Riley at NPD this morning. He told me that NPD will not give out week-by-week lifetime numbers for a particular title, but they will give out month-by-month numbers, even for individual titles, to members of the press (and he confirmed: for no charge) and to subscribers if they ask NPD for them.

If I am to assume that he is right (in regards to the information available to members of the press) and you are right (in regards to non-disclosure agreements of some sort), then I will suppose that the Gamasutra staff has seen the numbers for GTACW but cannot reveal them due to NDAs with NPD, so the Gamasutra staff is legally limited to saying that vgchartz's numbers are not accurate. Would that be a reasonable assumption?