GTA is a casual game. There isn't one unified casual gamer though.

You have the Wii Fit, Wii Sports, Carnival Games types, but you also have the Guitar Hero, GTA, Madden, Halo casual gamers.

No one denied that. Publishers just need to realise that it need time and passion to build up it's own fanbase on a platform, which they've ignored for years.

It can't. Especially a game like GTA. Every 3D GTA looks terrible because there is so much going on.

@ mai

But the comparison, due to sheer size of the DS install base versus PSP, shouldn't exist. The DS should demolish all.

It can

Why would you want that? That looks absolutely horrible.

Well, why do mainstream gaming platforms have such big userbase? They have core gaming crowd that buys a lot of software + expanded (see, I didn't say 'casual') audience with shallow interest in games except for prefered franchises\genres, those maybe won't buy a lot of software but they're still valuable consumers due to massive amount. DS is mainstream gaming platform in handheld area.

So if certain game sells 1mln on platform X with 10 mln userbase, it doesn't mean it would sell 10mln on platform Y with 100 mln userbase. This's kinda stupid comparison if I may say so... we should take into consideration WHO are the customers, potentially intereted in this game.

The most easy way is to divide userbase by gender, age and gaming expirence (the latter usually unknown, so going in with first two of them). According to Nintendo (last briefing with investors) >15% of DS userbase are males 14 to 24 years old (though game is rated M, it's kinda obvious that teenagers are definitely interested in this game), that translates into more than 12mln potential customers (Japan not relevant). How many of them are going to get GTA:CW? That's hard question, because I don't have any info on PSP userbase (well, Koller said once that ~40% of PSP userbase is teenagers, but I don't know how reliable this data).

Of course not, I'm not saying it should extrapolate exactly, but I would think the higher quality game on a much larger userbase would at least sell half of Liberty City Stories.

Played the hell out of the PS2 ones at friends houses, and got a decent amount of GTA 4, which was as technically brilliant as it was lacking in pure enjoyment. Unless the PSP versions have more going for them than I thought, yes, the DS version is by far the most outright fun.

As for the notion that this is bad for the DS. This is great news, it makes the notion of future DS/PSP GTA games far more likely. Hey, our DS GTA games don't do nearly as well as our PSP ones, so lets make another PSP game. No wait, lets make another DS,PSP GTA game! 

Double posts are fun... So My girlfriend just booked our flight to Tokyo! round trip flight from Korea and 5 night hotel stay all for about 1000 Canadian!

Cool. Won't be getting this either. never been a big fan of the top-down GTAs.