I have nothing against the lad, but how can someone who has so many connections in the industry get it so wrong? Especially when they pay him in 6 figures?

"According to online reports, Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS sold through just 88,700 copies in the U.S. in March 2009, far below analyst estimates.

Silicon Alley Insider reported, following NPD's Thursday debut, that the DS debut of the GTA franchise significantly underperformed even the lowest analyst estimates for the month.

The game did not appear in the NPD Top 10 for the month, meaning that it sold less than 205,000 units, but the Silicon Alley report revealed that its sell-through since its March 17th U.S. debut was less than half that predicted by EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich.

At the time, Divnich believed that sell-through of 200,000 would be disappointing in itself, explaining: "With the majority of publishers currently taking a risk-adverse stance, we expect this to slow the growth rate of future mature rated titles on the DS."

As a comparison point, the EEDAR analyst noted: "Previous GTA titles on the PSP have sold in excess 1 million units lifetime... The performance on the DS highlights clearly the demographic differences between the two platforms in the handheld market."

But with the actual game sales even lower than Divnich expected -- and massively lower than the estimates of Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter, who suggested that Chinatown Wars might sell as many as 450,000 units for the five-week month of March -- this may be considered a disappointing result for high-quality M-rated titles for Nintendo's handheld platform."

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23246

patcher is an idiot.

he also claimed the ps3 was gonna "close the gap" on the 360 and sell 350k in march.

he is a freaking numbskull - give BRETT his salary

So? This is the first time I've made such thread, and in fact the first time I've spoken about Pachter.

88,000 copy isnt bad for a ds game.
88,000 * $50 = $4,400,000.. the game probably cost $1 or $2 million to make my son :) plus the psp version did way worse

1. Does this game really cost $50??

2. That's revenue, not profit

3. It probably cost more then that

4. PSP version did better. Unless you are comparing it's sales from NPD in October, where it was released on the 31st, meaning it had 1 day of sales.

I've never really noticed him before, but this is a horrible miss for someone who has connections in the industry. If we at VGC had the access to data that he has, we would literally predict the exact NPD numbers.

sorry it cost $29.99

ok lets say retail gets it for $20 and then publisher get it for $10 ($10 goes to nintendo)

then after all costs like marketing, advertising, game evlopment, voice acting etc they make $3 per copy 88,000 * $3 = $264,000. that is a lot of money!

There's no voice acting. :P

But nowhere near as funny. :)

And I bet his constant talk about PS3 price-cut in media cost Sony at least some PS3 sales.

Based on the amount of copies i have seen at retail its no surprise somebody could screw up by that much.