Minus the "flop" bit. All of what he said was fact.

If you think posting facts is trolling, you obviously have a severe case of "I must refute anything negative Nintendo" syndrome.

And I know for a fact that the GB and GBA GTA games are rather rare, so while VGC lacks hard numbers on those versions, the fact that you can't go out an just find it like you can the PS1/PC versions (hell up until last year the local wal-mart still carried the PC version of the top down GTA collection, GTA1, GTA2, and GTA: London or something like that) that means it couldn't have sold that well, hell at Gamestop I've only seen one copy of GTA on the GBA between every store I've been to and the couple of years I worked there.

1 Million is good, though probably not good enough to make Rockstar excited about making another similar GTA for the DS, right? The game was clearly an experiment (trying out the 2D older style of gameplay) and it seems to have had mediocre results (on PSP as well, though it seems to be doing great on I-phone).

Also, people always point this out in other threads like this, but for some reason it hasn't been mentioned here in 22 pages:

The game has been selling for 15 bucks on Amazon. It's not even available new from Gamestop anymore -- they stopped carrying it. 1 million is a great milestone to celebrate, but it didn't exactly get there gracefully.  The game has been on clearance pretty much everywhere for a while now.  If you're going to talk about profitability, these are pretty big factors.

And that's another thing. Experimental works are almost always niche, no matter the brand name*. In fact, the brand name often sells those more than they would be.

* There are exceptions, but those tend to be that the experiment resulted in a mainstream work.

Aren't we kind of just using the word "mainsteam" or "niche" to mean "successful" or "unsuccessful" at this point?

I agree that they probably didn't spend very much on developing Chinatown Wars. In that sense, the game is probably like a niche game.

However, they almost certainly predicted higher sales (otherwise why would the developers themselves complain?)

I'm not making that up, right? Rockstar said they were disappointed in sales at some point? I might be making that up...

It was a troll post from a user with 11 posts, and you know it.

All his post showed was that 3D GTAs on consoles sell a lot better than 2D GTA on a portable.  It even left out the other 2D versions, and other portable versions.

It is clear that the market prefers 3D GTA to 2D GTA.  Is it really a surprise that a 2D GTA coming out 10 years after 2D GTA was somewhat popular didn't sell like the much more popular, more recent 3D GTAs?

And what is with the personal attacks?  I guess you have nothing more constructive to add to the discussion.

He posted facts. GTA was made into a MEGA selling franchise by those said GTA games. When on a system that is by far the most popular ever, GTa should manage to sell at least on par with the lowest selling of the gen, which would in this case be Vice City Stories.

As for the "personal attacks", that's coming from someone who calls some other guy a troll because he has 11 posts and posted facts..?

You are purposely ignoring that the games are very different.  That is like comparing the sales of 2D Mario and 3D Mario and expecting them to sell the same.

Yes, what is probably an alt with a GoW avatar posting completely misleading facts.

"Aren't we kind of just using the word "mainsteam" or "niche" to mean "successful" or "unsuccessful" at this point?"

Depends on the use. I use them to refer to audiences. The more enthusiastic the fans, the more niche that audience is. Something that is made for them likely will not appeal to the mainstream.

The problem is if you assume the mainstream goes for the brand name, and not the elements that make the brand name mainstream. So if Rockstar was disappointed, they expected the name to sell millions, when it's the name plus the elements.

As we've seen with Mario, a larger audience prefers the 2D Mario to the 3D games, regardless of the brand.

No, that's part of the reason. You ignored my other post that was right there with it which offered the rest of my explanation.

And again, you call it a flop. Lifetime sales will mock you, so watch what you judge now.