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.

Car Jack Streets, the GTA style top-down steal-em-up that was released just a few days ago has already been cracked and placed on to popular torrent sites. A couple of hours ago, TAG Games twittered;

SHOCKING! Looks like sales of Car Jack Streets are less than a THIRD of total users. That is a massive proportion of piracy.

So from those stats, it looks as though quite more and more users are using their jailbroken iPhones/iPods to grab a few free games and steal (quite literally) profit from indie developers that need it the most. Treat this as a call to arms; if you have $4.99 available, go and plonk in down on Car Jack Streets, then tell your friends to do the same.

It is not hard to see that outside of Japan and Korea that the PSP is not doing so well. Not only because of its sparse collection of good games but also due to rampant piracy. The piracy has actually become so severe that it has created a negative spiral for the platform, causing most third party developers, according to Sony’s senior vice president of marketing Peter Dille to be “…just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support…” Dille goes onto to say in a interview he had with Gamasutra that:

“It’s not good for us, but it’s not good for the development community. We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it’s frankly sickening.”

According to him, Sony attributes the loss in sales revenue due to the fact that older versions of its firmware, which can be easily hacked and modded (and has been happening the beginning of the PSP’s launch) are still readily available and it is almost impossible to compel users to upgrade. In addition, Sony also claims to be trying to close the piracy gaps so that piracy doesn’t affect this year’s titles [Ed. Note: Sony's had some brief luck in closing off version 5.50 of the PSP firmware]. Still, in the information age situations like these are not uncommon, they’re almost expected.

In many cases, piracy has become far cheaper to get into than actually buying games.

Piracy has been at the forefront of gaming politics for most every system for a few years now, but it is only with the success of services like BitTorrent and devices like the R4 and other DS flashcarts that have really put a damper on videogame sales. For example GTA: Chinatown Wars also did not meet its expected sales by significant numbers due to the readily available downloads and the cheap price of DS flashcarts. It does not end with portable market, Xbox 360 games are also heavily pirated, although to a much lesser extent due to the requirement to physically modify your system, and of course who could forget the various ROMs for older systems and the PC warez scene (most recently being in the news for the Demigod fiasco) that are constantly passed around file sharing sites like a steaming plate of paella. But what can developers do to prevent rampant piracy? From where I stand there are very few options.

They could convert their medium to proprietary formats like Sony’s Blu-ray discs for PS3, which has seen a rather minute amount of piracy since its launch; however, developers cannot just change the hardware of their systems and hope everyone will make the change. It would be naïve if they believed that would actually work. They could add lock out codes or chips into the games themselves, but pirates have always found ways around this method since the days of the SNES. I am sorry that I at the moment cannot think of another logical method to prevent the problem, but I really do not see any other way that is even feasible.

Look, I am one of those people who loves the industry enough to always buy his or her games. Sure with the influx of so many new titles I mostly find myself buying games used to save me some dough (which is another argument in and of itself that faces the industry, but that is a story for another time) but even if I want to try a game people say is good I never look towards piracy. Sure I own an R4, but I only have two games on it: One being the Pokemon Trading Card Game for the Gameboy Color (whose original cartridge’s internal battery have been known to fail and thus cannot save your progress) and a fan translation of Mother 3 (which is the only way I am going to be able to play and enjoy it until Nintendo realizes that we “deserve” to see Mother again). I admit by having these two games that there are certain situations that make piracy almost necessary in order to play a game, but when a game just comes out there is no moral reason to download it for free. Let it be known that the current recession should not make this act acceptable as piracy was done before and will still be done after we pass this moment in history.

By downloading games for free people are hurting the industry, preventing certain games from getting sequels and even keeping newer projects from seeing the light of day. How can videogames evolve as a medium if it is constantly being held back by piracy? I know the same can be said about movies, music, television and even books but at least those mediums had enough time to exist in a period where piracy as we now know it (on the Internet) was even possible. I know I cannot sway the gaming public with the words I write here today as I end this article feeling nothing but the sheer weight of pessimism that surrounds the situation. I can only hope that the future of gaming can at least withstand this issue until a true solution is found.