Grand Theft Auto 5 launched in September 2013. It has now sold more than 230 million copies. That figure, confirmed by Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick on the company’s August 7 earnings call, works out to roughly 17.7 million copies per year — a rate that most games released in the past decade can’t match across their entire commercial lifetime.
“The Grand Theft Auto series once again exceeded expectations,” Zelnick told investors. “Grand Theft Auto 5 sold over 230 million units worldwide.”
Thirteen Years and Counting
The number is genuinely hard to contextualise. GTA 5 has now sold across three separate console generations — PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at launch in 2013, then remastered for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and again updated for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2022. Each generation brought a new wave of buyers, and GTA Online — the game’s multiplayer component — gave existing players a reason to keep spending.
To put 230 million in gaming perspective: Rockstar’s own Red Dead Redemption 2, which launched in 2018 and is widely considered one of the best games of that era, has sold around 64 million copies. Baldur’s Gate 3, the breakout critical favourite of recent years, sits at approximately 20 million. Cyberpunk 2077, after a troubled launch and a full recovery arc, is around 40 million. GTA 5 is more than five times that.
The all-time all-format records still belong to Tetris (estimated 520 million) and Minecraft (around 400 million). GTA 5 sits third on most estimates.
Why It Keeps Selling
The continuous sales are partly a function of GTA Online, which has kept the game commercially alive well past any normal life cycle. Take-Two reported 5% year-on-year growth in GTA Online engagement during the latest quarter, driven in significant part by the “A Safehouse in the Hills” content update — which Zelnick described as one of the best-performing updates in the game’s history.
GTA+, the game’s monthly subscription service, has continued to grow in subscriber count and revenue. Its benefit structure — which has included access to games like NBA 2K26 — has helped retain subscribers beyond the core GTA Online audience.
GTA 5 remains the best-selling title of the past decade based on both unit and dollar sales — and it has generated an estimated $6 billion in lifetime revenue across all platforms.
GTA 6 Is Three Months Away
The timing of this announcement is not coincidental. GTA 6 is releasing on 19 November 2026, and Take-Two has staked its financial year on it — the company has issued guidance of $8 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings for fiscal year 2027, a number that only makes sense with a successful GTA 6 launch. Pre-orders are already in what Zelnick called an “exceptional” position.
Rockstar is also scheduled to release an extended look at GTA 6 on 27 August — this month — which should drive a further surge in pre-order activity and keep the franchise front-of-mind heading into autumn.
A Franchise That Defies Normal Rules
The broader Grand Theft Auto franchise has now sold nearly 475 million units globally. That’s the kind of number that puts individual game launches — even successful ones — into perspective. For Take-Two, GTA 5 isn’t just a historical achievement; it’s still an active revenue generator, still selling millions per quarter, and now serving as the commercial bridge to what may be the largest launch in entertainment history.
Whether GTA 6 can sustain the franchise’s sales trajectory is the bigger question. GTA 5 had 13 years of accumulated audience. GTA 6 starts from zero — but it inherits a platform, an audience, and a multiplayer infrastructure that GTA 5 built across more than a decade of continuous updates.
