And as for the price of games, my friends and I picked up GTA:CW for £17.99 (around $27) new – with free delivery (which actually arrived the day before release!), so don’t grumble about the price of games.
There are loads of retailers to choose from so shop around for the best price.

Need to make a correction, Chinatown Wars is not the only GTA on a Nintendo platform. There was a Grand Theft Auto Advance. My understanding is it didn’t sell well, but it reviewed well too. Also, I disagree that CW didn’t sell well. Since when is 90K units in less than two weeks poor sales? That’s pretty strong for a third party title on a handheld platform.

Last point, I agree with both of you on the piracy issue. Yes, tons of people are pirating the game. Piracy on DS is a major problem, no matter if people try to suggest that how much something costs is a valid argument for theft. However, most people who steal games wouldn’t buy them no matter how little they cost, or how hard it is to steal them. Incentives to buy games are a good idea, but I wonder how much effect they have on thieves.

I picked up GTA: Chinatown Wars during its launch week. Did see a lot of copies on shelves when I picked it up but knew that wasn’t any indication of sales since Walmart had lots of stacks of GTAIV during that launch week. We all know how well that title sold during its first week.

In my opinion the sales of Chinatown Wars definitely aren’t great but they aren’t abysmal. Like you guys mentioned it might turn out to be one of those slow burn titles.

I’m not exactly sure but I believe both GTA’s on the PSP took around a year for either to break a million copies sold so maybe Chinatown Wars will follow that path as well.

As for pirating I still don’t believe it’s quite to the level of affecting software as it has for the PSP. Mostly because of the fact that prior to the DSi there was no real easy way to load pirated games onto the DS. I’m still not sure if that’s the case but the homebrew and/or pirating community are extremely resourceful.

With the DSi I believe Nintendo will have more control over the pirating issue. They could implement the need of a firmware update for the game to be playable. This takes a bit from the quick popping in of a game of course but I don’t think Nintendo has many options besides though. I’m not a programmer though so take those opinions with a grain of salt.

Really love the show guys and keep up the great work,

-Win

P.S. If you didn’t buy the DSi, you would still have enough money to buy multiple DS games; it seems like you were just being selfish there.

yes, I pirated GTA:CW. It was hard to get it working. The savefile size was a special one which only worked on 1 flashcard. After a few days, the first fixes showed up and in a week, it worked on every flashcard. I arm7 and arm9 patched it to get it working. I replaced the arm7 and arm9 files in the ROM using DSlazy. Why? Because I had to pay 40 euro’s for this game which is $52,89 USD. I paid 165 euro, $218 USD for my DSi so another 50 bucks was just too much. I still buy nintendo points, simply because it’s cheap and easy but I don’t buy cartridge games because they’re just way too expensive.

I loved the Podcast,
Frank van Hunnik (Listener since 2006)