Some thoughts on GTA: China Town Wars...
The GBA versions did even worse, and it is tracking higher than one of the PSP GTA games. Its not a smash hit but I think it may sell well enough to warrant a sequel on DS.
If we take Pacther's and John Koller's DS & PSP demographics seriously here is what we have on the portables:
PSP - 47m users. 40% of which he claimed are between 13-17, which is younger than Sony expected and probably not a good GTA age since you have to be 17+ to buy it. If we assume people that young don't buy GTA games in large numbers (and I'm not sure thats the case as I remember GTA being huge in highschool but it isnt in college) that leaves 28 million PSP users outside the demographic. Some of them will be younger, and some will be women. If we say 40% of the remaining users are women or under 13, then there are 17 million potential GTA buyers for the PSP. The top GTA has sold about 5.66m on PSP, which is about 1/3 attach rate...which to me makes sense for that demographic.
DS - 101m users. Pachter/Webdush claimed 80% of DS users are between 8-16. Ok, that leaves 21m users. Call it 30% of the remaining users as younger than 8 or women. That leaves 15m DS gamers potentially interested in GTA. Most of these people probably grew up with Nintendo, and are probably less interested in GTA as a result, so the attach rate is probably at most 1/5 of these 15 million people and probably alot less, because someone like me who is going to end up with 25 DS games never even considered buying GTA: CW. I'd put it at 1/10. Given an 89k debut, strong legs, and the DSi launch I don't think its impossible for the game to crawl to 1.5m users.
These are clearly demographic estimates but I don't think they are terrible.
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
When there are more laws, there are more criminals.
- Lao Tzu
