After a horrible fourth quarter and showing a $15 million dollar loss, Take-Two, the publisher for the Grand Theft Auto series took quite a beating from Wall Street.  Back for more, Take-Two took another risk by publishing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Game Boy DS, a platform that is generally considered a system for children and “soccer moms” and not the 18-35 year old demographic that Rockstar generally targets.

So far, it’s a flop.  The expected sales they were hoping for was 200K-450K and they were only able to barely push above 80K despite being reviewed as the best game on the DS, and a massive marketing campaign.  The hope is that the sales will increase over time and over the long haul.

The production value of these games versus the sales is very marginal for the big publishing companies now.  Despite the millions of units put out by GTA, Take-Two barely squeaked by last year with $97.1M in revenue despite the big release of GTA4 and, like everyone else, their stock tanked with the market crash.  The year before they had a $138M loss.

This coming year, Take Two does not have a GTA5 coming down the line and Chinatown Wars did not do too well.  It’ll be interesting to watch if the downloadable content will be able to bolster the company.  But I think that Take Two is in serious trouble.

They may be one of the first major corporations to be hit by the profit wall of rising production costs with more and more hyper-realistic games.

Now the next company that is going to have the hardest time recovering production costs is this one:

Final Fantasy XIII by Square-Enix

“There is an unusual sort of pressure on Final Fantasy XIII,” said producer Yoshinori Kitase when speaking to Edge Magazine. “I’d say we need this game to have ten times the success of these smaller titles.”

Why does this seem like famous last words?