Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a DS exclusive no more; Rockstar Games announced today the touch screen-enabled trip through Liberty City is arriving on PSP later this year. Lower-than-expected sales may have been a primary motivator here, but is moving the game to PSP the right move? Chinatown Wars is not the GTA experience Rockstar has delivered on the platform before -- in fact, prior to Chinatown Wars' release, Rockstar told the press there were specific reasons GTA was different on each platform.

Gordon Holl, founder and president of Chinatown Wars developer Rockstar Leeds, was interviewed by a number of publications, where he discussed the reasons Chinatown Wars looked and felt so different from Rocsktar's previous GTA handheld games.
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31 studios from across Europe feature in the list - 26 of them in the UK. These include the likes of Rockstar North (third on the list and responsible for the Grand Theft Auto franchise), LEGO Star Wars developer Traveller's Tales (11th) and Media Molecule (18th), the developer of LittleBigPlanet - and the highest placed independent UK studio on the list.
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Thatgamingsite writes:

"Despite dissapointing sales, it looks like Rockstar are continuing their support for DS-venture 'Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars'.

Rockstar have just released downloadable papercraft templates for the Sabre GT car and Handgun Pistol for members of Rockstar to download and create with more on the way according to Rockstar."
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VG247: Dead Space: Extraction exec producer Steve Papoutsis has pinned MadWorld and GTA: Chinatown Wars' lacklustre reception on Wii and DS down to general unsuitability.

"I think that's happening because of what people are looking to buy, I guess," he told VG247 when asked if he was disconcerted by Sega's struggle in Wii's core space and GTA: Chinatown Wars' lack of traction on DS, talking at EA's spring showcase in London last week.
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Even though Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars has gotten off to an admittedly slow start, Nintendo has indicated that the company has faith in the game. Nintendo's Denise Kaigler believes that the sales of the game will continue to grow over time while Steve Singer expressed that Chinatown Wars is an important title in terms of strategy.
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The game's publisher and retail chain GameStop already told MTV Multiplayer earlier today that there's no reason to count the game out yet. Later in the afternoon, Nintendo said the same thing.

"'Chinatown Wars' is performing in line with AAA titles that have come to our platform like 'Spore' or 'Lego Star Wars," Steve Singer, vice president of licensing and the man who manages third party relations for Nintendo of America, told me in a phone interview. "Those games went on to have very different life-to-date sales numbers." A Nintendo rep pointed to sales of "Call of Duty 4" on the DS, which had sales of 36,000 units in its first month and went on to sell more than 500,000 copies.
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Initial NPD sales data reports are in for two hardcore Nintendo titles: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and MadWorld. Unfortunately, neither title seemed to have sold particularly well.
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The NPD group's sales stats for U.S. video games in March will be released this Thursday. But, before then, top analysts have cast their predictions.

One notable entry in the NPD list will be "Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars," as it represents one of the few M-rated games on the system, is one of the few games made to high quality standards for the DS by a third-party, and, of course, the first "GTA" on the platform.

Michael Pachter, the well-established analyst for Wedbush Morgan Securities, predicts "Chinatown Wars" at 450,000 units for the NPD reporting period ending in early April.

Jesse Divinich, analyst at research group EEDAR, pegs the sales "in the 200k range."
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Leigh Alexander from Gamasutra writes:

"Is it a poor profit proposition to release an M-rated DS title? EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich thinks so, estimating that GTA: Chinatown Wars sold only 200,000 units in March, less than many expected.

"It appears the industry may have been over-zealous with initial expectations on how GTA: Chinatown Wars would perform based upon the news it had received one of the highest quality scores for a Nintendo DS title," says Divnich."
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It'll take more than the Chinese Mafia to muscle in on Xploder's business interests , they've started a gang war and taken down the Triads in Rockstar's latest offering
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