Solving The Puzzle
Chinatown Wars has been in the news recently because it only sold 89k copies in its first month instead of the predicted 3-400,000. While nobody can doubt it’s high quality, the industry certainly needs to sit down and work this puzzle out because half the battle of making good games is about making sure the customer buys the goddamn thing in the first place, targeting the right audience with the right product and, with 100 million Ds units out there, this game represents a huge failure in game development and marketing.
Easy to say with hindsight of course. While Rockstar win praise for going against the trends and for being brave enough to experiment, sometimes you have to face the facts, accept them and act accordingly. Why has the Ds acquired a reputation of being something for kids and mums? Because it’s true, that’s why! With its young Ds audience and older female user base , it’s a fact that most people who own a Ds are either too young to legally buy this game or they have never heard of GTA, except in association with its violence in the mainstream press. Yes, there are hardcore gamers who play Ds but, in this generation, they remain in the minority and generally have far too many other games on other platforms crying out for their attention.
To me, it’s a bit like developing a cooking game for the Psp or making a World Of Warcraft game for Xbox Live Arcade : it’s simply the wrong genre on the wrong platform. Sure, you will pick up some sales if they are good enough games but you’ve lost the battle even before you even pick up your gun from the armoury!
And so, while Rockstar muse over lost sales and wonder if all that wasted manpower and development costs would have better utilised on other areas of the GTA franchise, Professor Layton has meanwhile sold over 3 million copies. Made by another third party developer, this game targets exactly the right audience and can be played by gamers of any age and gender. It also suits the very setup and nature of the Ds and its touch screen. And yes, anyone can go out and buy it!
Puzzle solved..
Simpler than that. The sort of gamers that love games like this are likely to own R4s or other flash cart based piracy tools. The game was up and around various websites for download. Therefore most people who wanted it downloaded it and didn’t bother paying for it. Thus the low sales.
Without the context of other sales figures for other high profile (and oft pirated) DS releases it’s a bit difficult to say whether those sales are indicative of more people pirating it than buying it, but that’d be a contributory factor if you want my guess.
I’d also put money on a lot of multi-platform-owning gamers not even giving it a second glance based on the screenies because “it looked a bit primitive in comparison to other flavours of GTA” which is a bit of a shame because it’s technically one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen on the DS.
That’s a good point : trouble is, this sort of piracy is difficult to quantify. I don’t know much about the numbers involved in R4 piracy but , if I was involved in making this game, i would certainly make it my business to find out. If it turned out that this sort of game is more likely to be pirated becuase of its intended “audience”, then surely that would be another reason not to make it?
Also, its really easy to say how many copies of x and y are pirated but trying to then measure that against it’s success is a lot harder. Does selling 3 million copies of Professor Layton mean it was a more successful game or does it mean the people who bought it are completely oblivious to piracy and R4 ? How do you quantify something like that?
Piracy, not casual gamers will kill the hardcore.