Rockstar’s hit crime sim is probably way more popular than you think.
Much to no one’s surprise, Rockstar Games recently announced that Grand Theft Auto 6 is in active development. But that doesn’t mean it’s putting its cash cow GTA 5 out to pasture yet.
The only non-mobile game that’s sold more than GTA 5 is Minecraft at 238 million sales. If you include mobile, Tetris passed 425 million paid downloads all the way back in 2014.
Rockstar’s hit Red Dead Redemption 2 sold 38 million copies, and even the never-ending releases of Skyrim have only sold 30 million.
GTA V accounts for more than half of the series’ 370 million sales. The entire Final Fantasy series has sold 164 million copies (just 4 million more than GTA V alone) as of September 2021, before the launch of FFXIV: Endwalker.
The Pokémon series barely edges GTA out, with 380 million sales as of March 2021. The Super Mario series has sold 389 million copies, excluding spinoffs like Mario Kart, while Call of Duty passed 400 million in April 2021.
GTA 5 and GTA Online made a combined $985 million for Take-Two in 2021, nearly a third of the company’s total revenue.
That still pales in comparison to Call of Duty, which made $3 billion for Activision in the same period.
Steamcharts puts GTA 5’s average monthly players at 94,544, as of February 2022. That number fluctuates around updates, with peaks above 250,000 players at the most popular times.
Impressive as that is, it’s nowhere near the perpetual chart-toppers Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, which respectively had 620,000 and 476,000 average players as of February 2022.
Since launching on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013, GTA 5 came to PS4 and Xbox One in 2014, PC in 2015, and it heads to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in March 2022.
Skyrim just beats it out, with releases on all the same platforms plus Nintendo Switch and a PSVR version. Of course, nothing beats Doom, which has been ported to 13 consoles and 8 operating systems, not to mention its countless unofficial ports.