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It’s Christmas joy for all at RockStar and Take-Two as Grand Theft Auto V continues its astonishing sales record. This week, just in time for the holidays, the game roared past 6m total sales – according to Eurogamer. That’s UK physical sales, no digital copies, since its launch on the 17th of September.
In the last week sales shot up by a massive 85% as it climbed to No. 5 in UK Top 40, a chart that it has dominated in a way unseen before. It has been in the Top 10 for 130 of the 170 weeks of its existence, a truly staggering achievement.
It’s no coincidence that sales have kicked up at the end of the year to pass that milestone. Grand Theft Auto V is still the must have game on any console. As hardware sales rise, so do sales of GTA V, often with uncanny accuracy when plotted on a graph.
Even those who have played it before feel the need to pick up a copy when buying a new console. The enhanced graphics on PS4 and Xbox One are only part of the attraction of course, it’s also the pull of the ongoing GTA Online element that keeps players buying from generation-to-generation.
That’s supported by ongoing digital revenues from the service. In October, in the UK alone, SuperData said the game had raised 2.52m in digital revenue. Some of that will be digital sales of the game, but the majority looks to be from in-game transactions.
Looked at in this regard it’s very hard to see Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 achieving anything like this success – though we think it will do far-far better than its predecessor. Appetites for a truly next-gen Rockstar game being huge, and further assisted by the current vogue for all things Western courtesy of TV hit Westworld.
