Just in case breaking the 70 million shipped copies milestone and grabbing two Steam Awards wasn't enough, GTA 5 is still making headlines with its immense success in spite of being over three years old. To top off the Steam holiday sale, Valve has revealed which games sold the most copies via their digital distribution and slapped a discount on them all.
There exists a prevailing misconception among GTA 5 fans that the PC demographic is tiny compared to console players. This is in spite of an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, including the extremely active and vibrant modding community, as well as the special attention Rockstar turned to solving the hacker issue on the platform.
While Valve didn't reveal exact numbers (they're probably not allowed to) they did group the various games into tiers of how well they performed from a commercial standpoint, with "Platinum" games being the top dogs, and GTA 5 is among them.
It shares this tier with the likes of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Fallout 4, among others. Since both of these are multiplatform games, they don't really give us a ballpark figure regarding sales. On the other hand, GTA 5 also shares the platinum tier with some heavy-hitting PC exclusives including Total War: Warhammer and Civilization 6. XCOM 2 is also present, and while it has received console versions, the vast majority of players are on PC.
These titles give us a rough idea of how many copies of the game were sold via Steam this year, with that number ranging in the multi-millions — likely between 3 and 6. Add to that all PC copies sold outside of Steam, and you've got a pretty damn big number. Sure, it might seem small next to 70 million, but keep in mind that most of those sales are from the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, so it's not like current gen consoles make up a significantly larger demographic.
As one of the 100 top selling games on Steam, GTA 5 was hit with another discount, which is identical to the one it got for the holiday sale. You can grab the game at 50% off, for just $29,99. As usual, various Shark Card bundles are also discounted, with the best deal being the Megalodon bundle. You get the game plus the largest Shark Card worth 8,000,000 in-game currency (which normally costs $100) for less than the full price of the title.
Did you contribute to GTA 5 getting into the best-selling Steam games of 2016?
