No, they would announce it on the day of the sale. If they announced it beforehand, then people who were about to buy their game would hold off until the sale.
The sale is during the weekend, most people have the weekend off so how would you expect it to be announced and to spread when blog authors are not working? Anyway, you're talking would and ifs, it's already announced and we aren't losing money from the sales they make.
They didn't; they announced a CURRENT sale. They changed the price but the appstore took forever to make the change available to everyone. Rockstar has recouped all the money from developing the game a thousand fold from DS and PSP sales. We are only paying for content instead of content + physical media + shipping like DS/PSP users which means Rockstar can do things like these sales. Honestly they aren't losing money, they're just making slightly less profit then they normally would. Currently it's somewhere near #35 in the games category so a sale like this is sure to get them in the top 25 by the end of the weekend. The increase in visibility is probably what their real goal is.
They were very poor sales though, I'm not sure they made very much profit. If any at all. Of course there's no way of really knowing for sure, unless they come out with the details themselves.
The sales figures were not as high as analysts predicted, but don't confuse that with bad sales. Nintendo themselves have said that GTA:CW has always been selling just as high as every other AAA title on the DS.
All I remember reading from Nintendo is that they were disappointed in the sales for GTA CTW. http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/12/09/nintendo-gta-chinatown-wars-frustrating-sales-due-to-marketing-or-lack-thereof/ What other triple AAA titles are the sales figures being compared to?
Yeah they didn't match the expectations for a GTA game, they wanted it to blast other AAA games out of the water, instead it bobbed alongside them happily.
