Grand Theft Auto 5's success remains a continued, unprecedented singular phenomenon in the video game industry, and it's still not showing any signs of slowing down. The game has surpassed another major sales milestone — and Expanded and Enhanced isn't even out yet. 160 million copies of GTA 5 have moved worldwide since launch.
The news comes from the latest Take-Two Interactive investor call, which revealed some other interesting tidbits about various Rockstar Games properties. Nonetheless, every other success and achievement of the company pales in comparison to how well GTA 5 keeps performing.
A financial pillar of Take-Two ever since launch, GTA 5 and GTA Online have defied the usual life cycle of the AAA game, with sales steadily rising as opposed to dropping. Being consistently popular and successful throughout eight years is something that you expect from MMOs — and even then many of those can't pull it off — but GTA 5 managed it too.
These newest stats show just how impressive the title's performance is — GTA 5 managed to sell 5 million units in the last quarter alone, which in and of itself is a record breaker. The game, which was already the fastest in the industry to pull $1 billion in revenue following launch, has generated $6 billion since launch.
All games together, the GTA franchise has sold over 370 million copies, of which over 160 million are just GTA 5, the latest one. Both on unit and dollar terms, GTA 5 has been the best selling video game in the USA of the decade according to Take-Two's stats.
A little presentation collecting these stats for investors — who presumably don't keep their fingers firmly on the pulse of the video game world since they're busy yachting or clubbing seals or whatever — highlighted that GTA Online is an important element of GTA 5's success, and that it's launching standalone on March 15.
Meanwhile, other Rockstar titles are also finding their own success. Red Dead Redemption 2 has sold almost 43 million units. Put next to GTA 5's staggering 160 million, that almost seems like a small number, but generally speaking that is still a hole lot of units, with many AAA titles these days struggling to pull numbers that compete.
Even so, Red Dead Online has known to suffer from content drought issues, and struggles to retain players at anywhere near the rate of GTA Online. Red Dead Redemption 2 likely owes its success rather to the universally praised story mode, despite Rockstar test driving the separation of it and the Online mode earlier, so to speak — that separation is coming to GTA 5 as well.
Even more surprisingly, according to sales data, despite the major controversy and widespread negative reaction and press, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition ended up being a major financial success. The buggy, broken release was met with vocal backlash, especially considering that the original versions were pulled from sale.
Said backlash resulted in the originals being restored to online storefronts, with customers who bought The Definitive Edition receiving free copies. Rockstar Games and Grove Street Games also committed to fixing things up with ample patches.
Overall, the past quarter was such a resounding success for Rockstar Games and Take-Two that the company increased their projections for the upcoming fiscal year. With Expanded and Enhanced around the corner, marking another re-release which means sale spikes, and the standalone separation of Online, GTA is set to achieve even greater success this year.
