Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5) passes 100 million units sold

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Numbers first: more than 100 million units shipped, five years after launch. That is what Take-Two Interactive confirmed about Grand Theft Auto V in November 2018, in its second fiscal quarter results presentation.

In practice, this means Rockstar’s game, released on September 17, 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, kept selling like a new release. It had already started with a record: 800 million dollars on day one and 1 billion in three days, the fastest entertainment product in history to reach those figures. Then came the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions on November 18, 2014, and the PC version on April 14, 2015, each one reopening the market for the same game.

Translating the jargon: the long-term engine was GTA Online, the multiplayer mode launched on October 1, 2013, two weeks after the base game, and updated with free content ever since. The strong performance of GTA V and GTA Online, together with the debut of NBA 2K19, took Take-Two’s net revenue for the quarter to 492.7 million dollars, up 11%. And all of this on the eve of Red Dead Redemption 2, which launched in October 2018.

The game also kept showing up month after month on the US best-seller lists, something rare for a title with more than five years on the market.

What came next

The curve did not flatten. On March 15, 2022, GTA V got PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions, the third generation of consoles to receive it. Today it is the second best-selling game of all time, with more than 230 million copies shipped and more than 10 billion dollars in revenue worldwide. Its successor, Grand Theft Auto VI, is scheduled for November 2026. In short: GTA V crossed three console generations and survived more PC upgrades than many people can count.

Source: Eurogamer / Take-Two Interactive.