Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars was released on DS in March and was a critical success on all fronts.  It was met with a fanfare of acclaim, receiving praise from all sorts of media outlets.  Needless to say, it was the front runner for DS game of the year for quite some time.  The only problem was that it didn’t sell very well on Nintendo’s handheld.

Rockstar Games has since taken every measure possible to make its award-winning game sell, including releasing it on the PSP.  After meeting more success on Sony’s handheld, Rockstar saw that there was one more handheld frontier for their game to conquer:  the iPhone.

Screen shot of the PSP version

Today, Rockstar finally completed the GTA trifecta on handheld platforms by launching Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for iPhone on the App Store for $9.99.  Along with the iPhone release comes some exclusive features for the iPhone version, such as Independence Radio, a radio station where you can create your own exclusive playlists using your iTunes songs.  Also included are multitouch controls, adjustable difficulty levels, higher resolution graphics and all that GTA gameplay we’ve come to know and love.

The price tag might be a little steep for some iPhone gamers, but compared for the thirty dollars you’d have to shell out for a DS or PSP version, I’d say that’s a fair deal.  If you’ve missed out on this classic handheld title on the other two systems, you definitely shouldn’t miss it for iPhone.

I am entirely convinced that the idea of console exclusives are over. The last nail in my brain was the announcement of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars being announced for PlayStation Portable. The Nintendo DS version has been out on the market since March 17, 2009, plenty of time for the Grand Theft Auto fanatic to either purchase the game for the DS or go and buy a Nintendo DS just so it could be played.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is the third GTA title to release on the PlayStation Portable after GTA: Liberty City Stories and GTA: Vice City Stories. It makes sense on a business level for Sony to start pushing for more titles on the PlayStation Portable, and even more so the upcoming PSP Go.

Sony needs to properly support the PSP Go from launch. They cannot afford to release the new PSP and leave it on the market for a couple months before properly supporting it. This is primarily because of the PSP Go’s lack of UMD drive.

Granted, gamers could use the PlayStation Store to download PSOne Classics or even some older PSP titles onto the PSP Go, but where will the money be at? The new downloadable titles. With Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars releasing around the same time, there is a title that will help sell the PSP Go for early adopters.

Pushing digital downloads is one of the smartest plans that Sony has come up with in recent years. Considering the constant news of GameStop’s never-ending record profits, mainly in used games, all consoles publishers need to find a way to get away from the secondary market. Digital downloads are the key.

Sony is also smart by not pushing this on the PlayStation 3 with full speed. They have been careful about what titles they are releasing as PS3 digital downloads, but using the PSP Go as the front runner is the best idea.

PSP titles already have a lower retail price point than its big brother, and digital downloads can also reduce the price of the game itself because there are no costs in packaging or printing of materials.

Of course, many gamers enjoy the physical product, myself included, but if a game costs less on the digital side than the brick and mortar purchase, I’ll go with the digital copy.

Sony might be onto a new revenue stream with the PSP Go, a flash memory based portable gaming system with a possible library of all previously released titles and digital download of all new titles. The only thing Sony needs to do is open the codec library on the PSP. Even just being the same as the PlayStation 3 would be a big step.

October is not that far away in a business sense, being the third quarter and the start of the holiday season. Sony will likely push the knowledge of the PSP Go at the upcoming gaming events and through the media. But the first day sales will really tell if Sony marketed something correctly or just wasted a lot of money.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars was meant to be a massive hit. It goes back (somewhat) to the old days of Grand Theft Auto, having a top-down view (albeit isometric rather than true top-down) rather than a Third Person View. It had all these features, great controls, and yet it hasn’t sold so well so far. In the first two weeks, it only sold 90,000 units in the US, a figure paled by the release of Pokémon Platinum, a recent title with similar fanfare, with over 800,000 in the first nine days, mathematically almost 14 times more successful in the same period of nine days.

There are reasons for this; reasons I’m going to explain.

Let’s get it started. The DS has long been heralded as a handheld console for everyone. From your kid to your grandmother, apparently everyone can find a game on the DS that they will fall in love with, and will loop them into buying more games for the system. This has long been Nintendo’s marketing campaign, and has been successful, managing to make even obvious crapware titles sell relatively well, and allow unheard-of titles to explode in popularity. Therefore, when a title that has such a status quo about it like Grand Theft Auto comes into the mix, it has already alienated a large amount of its audience that has a DS, simply because it’s a GTA title.

When people think of Grand Theft Auto, if they are not genuine gamers, rather than the casualcore hybrid that the DS and Wii have spawned, they will see this as the title that they wish to avoid. They think GTA, they think Fox News Exclusive, about how person X murdered person Y and it was all because of Grand Theft Auto. We all know otherwise, but an informed minority can always be outweighed by the uninformed majority, unless they are in a seat of power. The DS has been billed as the console for everyone, yet here is a Grand Theft Auto title; a series well known for appealing to the ‘hardcore’ gamer.

A screenshot from the game, depicting what made GTA famous: Running for your life from Blues.

Chinatown Wars also suffers from the M rating. M titles are often associated with blood, violence, connotations of sex and nudity, amongst other things. Let’s not forget that GTA: CW’s main focus is on drugs. The Mature rating means that it’s kept with the other games of its caliber ie out of the reach of children, and more likely than not, out of the line of sight, too. We all know that parents buy Mature rated games for their children, but couple the Mature rating with GTA’s perception in the eyes of the media, the chance of a parent buying this for a child are next to nothing. There are obviously some that will take pride in their child’s maturity, and want to buy them this game, but that’s a fraction of the potential DS audience that I was talking about before. Despite how the ratings are not legally binding in the United States, it doesn’t change the fact that if someone bought Assassin’s Creed and looked a year or two underage, the store clerk might let it slide if his job didn’t depend on it. GTA? Almost no chance.

So just by being a GTA title, and having the M rating, we’ve thinned down the audience to genuine gamers above the age of 17 that have a DS. This is excluding any of the game’s content, regardless of good or bad. So let’s consider the piracy angle. Piracy was covered pretty thoroughly by Matthew Latino in his article, but let me be specific about handhelds. The piracy community in handhelds is thriving. The DS piracy community has many reasons to exist, the main one of which is that it is extremely expensive to buy DS games new (at least in the UK). I know for a fact that I can get a hold of a DS flashcart and a MicroSD card to use it with, cheaper than a real DS game. There are the obvious reasons that some people just want to do it because they can, and some that consider it sending the publishing companies a message.

The R4 is Nintendo's primary target in the fight against DS Piracy.

But, back on topic, I would make an educated guess that about 80% of the genuine gamers that own a DS at least know of a method of piracy that they could easily obtain and use.  I’m not saying that 80% would actually pirate the game, but with DS piracy getting to the point where Nintendo themselves are launching attacks against specific devices (and the resultant backfire), a good chunk of that ‘hardcore’ gaming crowd that uses the DS has to be using said hardware. Now, we all know that in gaming, curiosity is what drives us forward in games; the urge to know what happens, or what surprises are around the corner, or what challenges are to be faced. Therefore, it’s a solid conclusion that the majority of those that are interested in GTA: Chinatown Wars will in fact download it and try it. Then they will play it, get bored, and not purchase it.

Game Over. Sale lost.

So, the audience that this game appeals to (DS owners that are 17 or older, and into Grand Theft Auto, or know of it’s genuine mechanics rather than those spouted by the media) will, in the majority of cases, try the game via piracy or via an emulator. Each person that tries that is an almost-guaranteed loss of sale. It’s not very often in the gaming world that this can be said, but with the Grand Theft Auto license as it is, and the opportunity to rent a DS game purely at the discretion of Nintendo (of which, in the UK, they have been pretty strict about), a company that is known for being stingy on such a matter, the only two real ways to try a DS game, is to buy it, or pirate it.

It’s disappointing to see an obviously highly polished title go this way, but it is the world we live in. We may see this become a Brain Training of the DS, with constant sales that line Rockstar’s pockets. But as a release, it’s not gone well.