The main show-stealer has been, as always, Grand Theft Auto 5. These recent times have been quite busy for the game as far as releases and reveals go, with Rockstar Games finally officially confirming that GTA 6 does, in fact, exist. We’ve also got the Expanded and Enhanced next-gen port coming on March 15, and more Online DLC to look forward to.
The 8 year old game is going stronger and stronger, defying all known models for how long these games sell this well. MMOs and, more recently, live service games show similar signs of longevity, but even these don’t always hit the kind of age and rate of success that GTA 5 has. The game has crossed the 160 million shipped units mark, with 5 million of those being sold in the last quarter alone. Grand Theft Auto hit the true mainstream long ago, and is even more of a household name these days with completely “casual” players as well as people entirely uninvolved with gaming as a hobby still knowing and recognizing it to a degree. Since the series inception, the franchise moved over 370 million units - consider that 160 million of those are just GTA 5. The game’s impact on Take-Two’s finances cannot be denied, as GTA Online has consistently been the top earner every month, every quarter and every year with its microtrans- I’m sorry, with it’s “recurrent player spending opportunities”. While GTA 5 already held the record of game quickest to recoup $1 billion in revenue after launch, ever since that it’s been steadily earning and has overall generated over $6 billion in revenue for Take-Two. In the presentation prepared for the investors, Take-Two brought attention to the impact and continued popularity of GTA Online, and highlighted the fact that it is getting a standalone release on the 15th of March. This model has already been tested with Red Dead Redemption 2 and Red Dead Online, as the latter struggled to gain the kind of following and retain players like its modern-day counterpart has. Additionally, the standalone version of GTA Online is going to be free on the PlayStation 5 for its first three months, which will add to the game’s player count even more drastically than just the standalone release on its own - which no doubt will be a boost in its own right. Those new players? All potential microtransaction customers. Considering that GTA 5 is looking at the Expanded and Enhanced re-release in March, we expect to hear the next quarter outperforming even this one, since releases - even re-releases - always bring with them major sales spikes. If the game moved 5 million copies in one quarter with no outstanding marketing push, how many will it move when a new version launches on current platforms, with new content, alongside a standalone GTA Online? The investor call also revealed some other interesting and at times surprising trivia about other Rockstar properties. Red Dead Redemption 2 is also doing really well, despite not really being in the news. Nearing 43 million copies sold, it seems like a comparatively small number when reported on the same page as the colossal GTA 5, but in a vacuum that is still more than what most AAA games manage. It’s also significantly more than the population of many countries! We imagine Red Dead Online testing the waters with its standalone release yielded positive results, with Rockstar moving to apply the model to their golden boy as well. Red Dead Online did struggle initially due to what players felt was a lack of content, and underwhelming updates, but has seemingly hit its stride since. Much more surprising however is that apparently Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition also pulled strong numbers. The remasters were mired in controversy both before and after release, which many expected would hit sales. Take-Two aggressively targeted fan-made mods that graphically enhanced the original titles, and pulled said original titles from sale, essentially assassinating the competition. That didn’t sit right with fans from the get-go, but when The Definitive Edition launched in a less than definitive state, the anger was amplified. The buggy mess kicked up such a storm that Rockstar put the original, un-remastered versions back on storefronts and gave free copies to anyone who bought The Definitive Edition. They also committed to fixing the remasters and shuffled studio resources to put more emphasis on patching. Even so, The Definitive Edition was apparently a resounding success, showing that sometimes some companies and their IPs are - maybe unfortunately - too big to fail. GTA is so mainstream that many of the players and customers are disengaged from the gaming community to a degree of not knowing or not caring about these controversies at all. We’re curious to see how the upcoming releases and changes affect the performance and future of GTA 5 and Online. It’s only February, and we expect to be writing about more sales milestones before the year is over - and at this point, it is only a matter of time before the game hits the fabled 200 million.
