From what I've seen Chinatown Wars is only around a 100 meg game. That's not a crazy amount of work to make. Most DS games seem to clock in around 30-50 megs each.

A 100 meg game is like, NOTHING compared to the work that would have to go into a 10-15 gig game.

As far as I can see, DS games are pretty much pure profit.

Moon and Dementium are niche games.
They need to get the words out on their games though. Hardly anyone know of them.

The size of the game doesn't determine how big a budget it is.

The vast majority of games memory space is taken up by things like video, textures, audio and models. The actual code takes up very little.

A well written FPS using procedural generation can take up 96kb of memory and still be pretty.

The games called kkrieger. It is actually only 96kb.

Didn't  kkrieger use an exploit that allowed it to be compressed to such a size? I'd swear I read that the game, under normal circumstances, would have been 2-300 megs. (Running in anything other than windows, which was exploited.)

The point is, that it still takes far less effort to make a DS game, than anything on the consoles or PSP, because generally speaking there is less work to be done. Fewer artists, fewer coders, less of everything. (And yes, GTA:CW may have had the most coding of any GTA game, but we all know it took far fewer man hours to make CW, than it took to make GTA 4.)

@Shanobi.

Nah its because its procedurally generated. It'd take 200-300 meg if it had been done the normal way.

Is everyone forgetting its sales in Others?

It may have been a flop here in the US, but as far as I know, UK/Europe are loving it saleswise.

It's silly to call this a flop. It is one of the only (or is it THE only?) M-rated games on the platform. It takes time to build an audience, but this is a good (albeit a very late) start for Mature-rated games on the DS.

Hopefully it will make Rockstar release more content on the Nintendo platforms. I don't think anyone expected this title to sell millions in it's first month.