It does look embarassingly bad for such a huge franchise on such a huge console base:

source

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 8-16, which is younger than Sony expected. 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 30% of the remaining users are women or under 8, then there are 20 million potential GTA buyers for the PSP. The top GTA has sold about 5.66m on PSP, which is about 1/4 attach rate...which to me makes sense for that demographic.

DS - 101m users. 80% are between 8-16. Ok, that leaves 21m users. Again, 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.

Only Nintendo games sell on Nintendo platforms. I don't see why anyone is feigning surprise right now.

Yeah it bombed, but its not like the DS needs a GTA game.

And as for PSP, well that does need GTA because its one of the very few game franchises that sell well for it.

I have 5 friends who also have the game. I'm the only one who bought it. They use R4.

Well there have been lots of DS games to start off not so hot and then stay consistent. This has been a quite normal trend for DS games actually. So being such a large brand that GTA is I'll give it til after the holidays to improve sales. But once again it does seem that the popularity of the brand appeal didn't add to the opener of the game at all which is kind of disappointing.

Resistence Retribution did even worse. The only handheld game that did good on March was Pokemon Platinium. What happened in America? It's like the opposite from Japan.

Nintendo handhelds have legs, I thought?

Speaking of resistance, every single person I know that was interested in buying the game, didnt buy the game, but SOMEHOW have it on there memory stick, im guessing they downloaded it via torrent sites.

I am starting to worry about the PSP in the U.S, hopefully sony can turn things around.

Why is it then that third party publishers have 30 titles that have sold a million copies on Wii?

Guitar Hero III alone earned Activsion over $300 million in revenue just from the Wii version.