Nintendo frustrated by GTA sales

Having stoically toed the positive PR line until now, DS platform holder Nintendo has for the first time openly admitted that Rockstar’s critically successful Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars has failed to perform as it would have liked.

It’s frustrating, quite frankly,” NoA’s executive VP of sales and marketing Cammie Dunaway told MTV Multiplayer. 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.

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.

But part of what’s needed is you have to continue to put marketing support behind these titles. It’s one of the things we’ve learned 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.”

Despite analysts previously claiming that Chinatown Wars had commercially underperformed, leading some to question the very viability of mature games content on the twin-screened console, Nintendo itself has always until now insisted that sales of the game were in line with expectations.