More people bought the 11 year-old Grand Theft Auto 5 in August this year in the EU than any other game.
Truly nothing can stop Grand Theft Auto 5 it seems — not time, not other releases. More than a decade after it first launched, Rockstar Games' magnum opus (until the sequel is released, that is) is once again perched triumphantly at the top of the sales charts. At this point, we're convinced that GTA 6 is the only force in the gaming industry that can slam the brakes on GTA 5.
Sitting in the comfortable #1 spot for the European Union video game sales charts for August 2024, GTA 5 beat more recent releases like Star Wars: Outlaws and Concord. Admittedly, seeing the competition does make the achievement a little less impressive — Ubisoft themselves stated that Outlaws' sales were below target, and Concord was a whole other level of failure, being taken offline with all copies refunded.
That said, even if GTA 5 came out ahead of games without particularly stellar performances, the fact that an 11 year old game pulled this off, after already smashing so many sales records that we're surprised anyone with even the slightest affinity for gaming out there doesn't own it, is still noteworthy.
Industry analysts have pointed out one factor that might be skewing the numbers a bit — runaway success Black Myth: Wukong's digital sales numbers are not available, only the physical sales. Educated guesses suggest that the soulslike based on the seminal literary work Journey to the West has the potential to take that top position if all forms of distribution were accounted for.
Earlier this year in June, GTA 5 broke a major sales milestone even without topping charts — more than 200 million physical copies of the game have been sold across all platforms since its initial release in 2013. This puts the title in a very, very exclusive club of video games — one it shares just with Minecraft.
With GTA 6 launching in 2025 — barring any delays, which Take-Two is repeatedly denying — and it taking ten years to hit 200 million sales, we don't see GTA 5 realistically breaching the 300 million needed to overtake Minecraft. That said, each subsequent numbered mainline GTA game sold significantly more units than the previous one, so the possibilities of the sequel eclipsing the already stellar performance of GTA 5 and becoming the #1 best selling game of all time are non-zero.
We'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, with Grand Theft Auto 5 still managing to top sales charts, we're curious to see where the sales milestones will cap out for this legendary title.
