Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar, said in its latest quarterly financial report that GTA V sold over 160 million copies. Grand Theft Auto isn’t the only popular series Take-Two Interactive is boasting about today, as sales of Red Dead Redemption 2 are revealed to be approaching the nearly 43 million copies sold since its release.
On paper, the numbers look great, especially when you take into account the fact that the game sold about four million copies in the last quarter. The “GTA Remastered Trilogy” appears to be selling pretty well despite an extremely terrible launch, according to some folks who have reckoned with Take-Twos’ recent earnings figures. But that didn’t seem to stop them from selling very, very well. Now that GTA V has sold 160 million copies and continues to sell year after year, Rockstar has almost proven that any version of GTA will appeal to eager fans, even if it’s nothing more than a trashy mess.
Take-Two has sold 15 million units of GTA since the release of the GTA Trilogy. According to the publisher, five million of the aforementioned 15 million can be attributed to GTA 5, meaning that the remaining 10 million are almost certainly related to Rockstars remasters of their PS2 classics. In the absence of any other major GTA games being released at the time, GTA Trilogy is likely to be mostly responsible for the remaining 10 million sales, and that’s just from November to December, beyond what could have happened sold in the first week of January or February.
When you directly compare the success of GTA 5 with other games or even the entire series, the figure of 160 million copies sold becomes even more incredible. As Jason Schreier points out, GTA 5 alone has sold more than all the Resident Evil games combined. According to the same earnings report, GTA V was the best-selling game of the last decade in the US in money terms.
Take-Two reports that Rockstar Games GTA V, released in 2013 for PS3 and Xbox 360, is still one of the best-selling games of all time, with over 160 million copies sold to date. Next-gen versions of the Grand Theft Auto game are likely to push the number of units sold even further, especially if GTA Online’s sales work somehow, but Minecraft still has an advantage over GTA V. All in all, the GTA saga allows Rockstar to boast 370 millions of games sold, with GTA V accounting for 43.24% of the franchise’s total sales, which is a huge percentage given the number of episodes and compilations available. Grand Theft Auto 5 sold well in numbers, but it’s not the best-selling game of all time, second only to Minecraft, which Microsoft says has sold more than 238 million copies.
