Nintendo: GTA: Chinatown Wars sales have been "frustrating"

Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America's executive VP of sales and marketing has called the performance at retail of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars "frustrating" and implied a continued marketing push was needed to sell the title over a longer period of time.

Speaking to MTV Multiplayer, reported by Kotaku, Dunaway said: "It's frustrating, quite frankly. 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."

Chinatown Wars entered the UK chart at number six upon release, achieving opening week sales of only around half those achieved by GTA: Vice City Stories on PSP. This was despite the game being awarded a Metacritic score of 93 - higher than any other GTA game on a handheld.

In the US analysts originally predicted the game would sell as many as 2 million units in its first year. However those estimates were slashed to 500,000 as the game reportedly sold just 89,000 units in the first full month following its release.