By GTA standards, CW's opening week was modest to say the least.  Many are already calling the game a sales failure in relation to the size of the DS userbase.  However, I think a couple of things are often ignored in the thought process that reaches such a conclusion:

1)  GTA is very much targeted to a male audience.  I'd be surprised if females accounted for as much as 5% of GTA IV's sales.  The DS userbase is around 50% female.

2) CW is an 18-rated game.  I really don't know what the average age DS owners is, but school kids undoubtedly account for a large proportion of them.

If the target audience for a GTA game is males who are over 18, people shouldn't be looking for huge numbers from CW.  The target audience may account for less than a quarter of DS owners.

The average DS owner is in their twenties, I believe. I know that the Wii is at 29.

That seems odd. Do you have any source ?

For which one? I don't for the DS, but I do for the Wii.

Don't worry about people who use such "fanboy" logic.  Companies create games to make money; they are not their assuming that userbase's are homogeneous.  

I think the problem here is that some half of the DS users (according to Nintendo) are female. That's why stuff like Leyton and Cooking Mama charted better than Chinatown Wars. I think Rockstar themselves said they hoped Chinatown Wars would expand DS audience...


And maybe it will, even though the opening was less than impressive. There's a DSi launch in a few days, and maybe people will pick up CTW with it...

If the averaage of a DS owner is in the twenties, then it is likely that te target audience accounts for much less than a quarter of DS owners. (The DS has far more "elderly" owners than the other consoles. If their presence in the demographic still only brings the average age into the twenties, there must be a hell of a lot of under 18s who own the console.)

Half in Japan.

In the USA it is only 27%.... though for last years buyers it was 48% (which means that 27% is increasing)

As of when is the 27%?

If both are as of end of the year...

That means

Let's say there was a 50-50 split last year.

That's 6M - 6M (a bit less on both sides).

The total DS sales are 31.6M. So, the total is 8.5M women, 23.1M men.

Before the year, the result had then been

2.5M women, 17M men.

Obviously, that's not the case. So the 27% data has to be 3/4 of a year, or more, old.

If you say it is as of the end of July 2008, that results in.

Men - 18.25M

Women - 6.75M

If the sales have been split 55-45 since then, that leaves us with

Men - 22.5M

Women - 10.75M

And I'm guessing the data is older.

It's probably at around 33% now I'd assume.

plus the production budget must be significantly lower than say gta 4, so they dont need as many copies bought to break even!