How much money has GTA 5 made? — 2024 statistics

Grand Theft Auto V made $8 billion in revenue.

(Source: Tweak Town)

• It generated $800 million in just 24 hours after release, turning into $1 billion after three days.
• GTA Online made $985 million in the fiscal year 2021 solely through microtransactions in-game.
• By April 2016, the online mode had made $500 million, earning around $13.5 million per week.
• In 2019, GTA Online was making $5 million per day!

GTA V has been a global success since its release in 2013. Eight years later, it is clear that Rockstar and their favorite are not done yet. The game is still selling units left and right. The online component is racking in huge amounts of money thanks to the different microtransactions available (upgrades, accessories, clothes, in-game currencies, etc.). Plus, the title has now been on two different generations of consoles and is getting ready for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in March 2022. The longevity of the game, financially and game-wise is simply astounding.

Grand Theft Auto V has sold a total of 195 million units worldwide.

(Source: Statista, IGN)

• In 2018, the game had sold 90 million units meaning that in 2017, Rockstar managed to sell a whopping 15 million units.
• In May 2019, Take-Two announced that that total was now up to 110 million units, and in 2020, it reached 120 million units before June/July.
• From fiscal years 2014 to 2021, GTA V has always sold more than 10 million units each year, with its smallest year 2019 accumulating “only” 13 million sales.
• In the UK, only a week was necessary to sell 2 million units. And by 2017, GTA V had sold 85 million copies in the United States alone.
• GTA 5 sold an addition 5 million units during the previous quarter of 2023.
• By 2020, 20 million copies were sold on the PS4: 30.3% were from North America while 48.5% belonged to Europe.
• GTA V is still the most expensive game with a budget of $256 million for production and marketing.

From 2013 to 2021, the game has been selling at least 10 million units each year, amounting to 20+ million for some of them. 2020 has been the only year when the game was not featured among the games with the highest sales. Only in 2020, because in terms of lifetime, Grand Theft Auto V is the second best-selling game, right after Tetris. And because it will be released next year on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the online mode will be standalone if you so desire, that PlayStation started a campaign rewarding people who intend to buy it with 1,000,000 of the in-game currency each month until the game is released and that both the main campaign and the multiplayer will have new exclusive content and enhancements, yeah, we are not done seeing that total rising higher.

The Grand Theft Auto series has sold over 380 million copies.

(Source: Statista)

• The highest-selling game is GTA V with over 170 million copies sold.
• GTA San Andreas sold 27.5 million copies.
• GTA IV sold 25 million copies.
• GTA Vice City sold 17.5 million copies.
• GTA III sold 14.5 million copies.
• GTA Liberty City Stories sold 8 million copies.
• GTA Vice City Stories sold 4.5 million copies.

We’ve taken a look at the sales stats for Grand Theft Auto V, but we can also see that it is the shining star of Rockstar Games, netting the vast majority of sales in the entire series. The second-highest-selling game of the series is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, another hit title and one of the most popular games of all time. The rest of the series has posted some fairly impressive sales considering the time they were made.

Grand Theft Auto V has received over 50 awards and accolades.

(Source: IMDB)

• Starting with one of the most prestigious of them all: the BAFTAs. The game won 3 different awards and was nominated 6 times.
• It was nominated at least 4 times at the NAVGTR and also won in all the categories it was at the Steam Awards, making it 4 wins for GTA V.
• It was also nominated twice by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

Of course, those are mostly the most notable since they are connected to the video game industry and arts in general. It is essential to acknowledge those awards, too as they contribute to showing the world that video games are way more than just “pixelated games used to pass the time.” Nowadays, many of them are movies of their own merit with fantastic voice acting, graphics, directing, story, soundtrack, etc. That is also why most of those live adaptations coming from Hollywood mostly fail: players already have a movie they can even interact with. Is there a need for a watered-down version of it? 

Grand Theft Auto V user stats

GTA V features a proper multiplayer with more options than what we saw with other attempts at multiplayer with Rockstar for that particular franchise and even the possibilities of future updates. GTA aficionados were in utter bliss. The appeal of roaming freely in Los Santos and San Andreas, wreaking havoc with your friends, and taking the GTA special touch to a whole other level has been on the mind of the community for ages now. 

Grand Theft Auto V had 17 million average monthly players in October 2022.

(Source: Fiction Horizon)

• The game had 15 million average monthly players in May 2022.
• It had 16-8 million average daily players in September 2022.
• From May to October, the game saw a 17.3% increase in the average monthly player count.

Grand Theft Auto V is a game that you can easily play for over a hundred hours, not including multiple playthroughs, but every game is bound to get boring eventually since you can’t do much once you have achieved everything the game has to offer. However, the good thing about Grand Theft Auto V is the multiplayer mode where every single session brings something new to the table. That is the reason the game has so many players nearly 10 after it came out.

Grand Theft Auto V had 1.2 million average daily players in October 2022.

(Source: Fiction Horizon)

• The game had 1.064 million average daily players in May 2022.
• It had 1.18 million average daily players in September 2022.
• From May to October, the game saw a 17.3% increase in the average daily player count.

This line of statistics is basically the same, just a scaled-down version of the monthly player information. The interesting thing is that the game had nearly the same percentage increase in both daily and monthly active players over one year.

Most GTA players are between 18 and 34 years old.

(Source: Reddit, GTA Forums)

• On GTA Forums, the next biggest group is 35-54 with 29.34%.
• 55 and older stand at approximately the same value in both polls (2.69%).

The poll has been conducted by the same user on those two platforms. We can easily see that GTA Forums is preferred by adults, which are also the biggest crowd in the game. Since the first GTA was released in 1998, Rockstar never hid that the series was created with adults in mind. The game clearly trusts its audience to know when the game starts and ends. With its more than mature themes, the rating has never been an issue within the community, full of working adults; some of them (if not most of them) even grew up alongside the franchise. However, a lot of criticism has been hurled at the games (for every release), labeling it as one of the causes behind modern violence in children/teenagers. Never mind the fact that parents are the ones buying the game and that the age rating is right there, slapped on the front cover, or in full display on the page when buying on Steam. 

Grand Theft Auto V has garnered 2.1 million monthly active users.

(Source: Active Player)

• 33.8 million players had registered and tried the multiplayer mode one year after the release of the game.
• In 2018, nearly 56 million players were on PS4. As of November 2020, this number has been estimated to be over 140 million. And for the same period of time, 72.5 million users played on Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

GTA V had to deal with millions of players right after its release quickly. Not only in terms of the individual for the single-story mode but also for its multiplayer. Sure, it was coming for free with your game, but not everyone is interested in playing online. So, we can infer that a lot of those sales first came from players wanting to play the main campaign, which must be the case because, in the beginning, the multiplayer was just plain terrible and impossible to play. Then Rockstar started fixing it and adding content, and since it was around the time it went on Steam and crossed to the next-gen of consoles, not only people who could not buy the first batch, but people who upgraded their consoles would then buy a new copy since they wanted to continue playing online. Covering generation after generation of consoles is pretty smart!

Grand Theft Auto V usage stats

Time to take a closer look at how the community consumes the game. It might be GTA, but there is still some order to it. The multiplayer mode suffered a lot of hiccups during its inception, but Rockstar worked really hard to fix those and continuously provide content to enhance the players’ experience in-game.

Players in United States have the highest rate of daily participation at 11.06%.

(Source: Player Counter)

• Brazil is #2 with 8.38% and is followed by Russia as #3 with 5.85%.
• The rest of the Top 5 are occupied by Germany (5.25%) and Poland (4.63%).

We can understand why the United States is first: as many players have said before, they recognize their country or specific cities that have served as models. Of course, there is also the fact that the game is awesome, but that is always a plus. 

32.8% of players still play GTA V on the Playstation 3.

(Source: Fiction Horizon)

• 2.1% of players play the game on PC.
• 25.5% of players play on the Xbox 360.
• 12.12% of players play on the Xbox One.
• 27.4% of players play on the Playstation 4.

The stats surrounding platform distribution might be a bit dated, but it still gives us a good view of the distribution of players that play the game regularly. It is very difficult to gauge how many players truly play the game on consoles, but we can be sure that the real numbers are staggering.

The most expensive vehicle in the game (both GTA V and GTA Online) is the Luxor Deluxe, worth $10 million.

(Source: GTA Base)

• It is followed by the P-996 Lazer (and its excellent stats worth 81.25%), which can be bought for $6.5 million.
• The RM-10 Bombushka is #3 with the steep price of $5,918,500 (31.04%), while the most expensive car finally shows up: the Ruiner 2000 will cost you $5,745,600 (65.26%).
• Finally, rounding up the top 5 is the Tula, worth $5,173,700, but with pretty sad overall stats (30.51%).

I hope you are into cars, planes, and whatnots because GTA V/GTA Online is a haven for tuners and vehicle connoisseurs. Gathering them and showing them off is a past-time a lot of players indulge in. The numerous updates and events focused on giving some love to your vehicles are always around the corner. Signs of wealth, do not even have to be efficient for people to drool over them. 

The most powerful weapon, the Remote Sniper, boasts a score of 73.20% in efficiency.

(Source: GTA Base)

• The Widowmaker (sic) and the Minigun are both #2 with an efficiency estimated at 63%. They are then followed by the Heavy Sniper MK II and the Heavy Sniper with their 62.60% as #3 ex aequo.
• #4 is the Combat MG MK II scoring 59.40% and finally at the bottom of the top 5, the Sniper Rifle at 59.20%.

Know your guns, that is really all one can say. It is GTA after all. And remember that in this game (like in Saints Row), size does not always mean that you have a powerful beast in your hands. The only issue is that, most often than not, you will find a smartass online who decided to mod/hack their weapons to be able to obliterate everyone for no reason at all.

The highest number of concurrent players playing Grand Theft Auto V was 360K.

(Source: Steam, Steam Charts)

• The highest number of players on average is 192,714 in April 2015.
• In 2021, the number of players has been pretty consistent with an average of 75,000 – 119,000 players. The average during peak hours is 136,000 – 218,000.
• GTA V is the fifth most played game on Steam with a total of 55,369,017 hours played.

Signs that the title was most expected on Steam, it set all its records during its release month. In general, the game makes great numbers, but none as successfully as the legendary April 2015. The game is played for an average of 1.5 million hours to 2.5 million hours each month. Meaning that the player base is pretty loyal and engaged, and that, even if the game is plagued with hackers killing people indiscriminately. And that is only for Steam, so imagine the numbers on other platforms… 

Grand Theft Auto V tournaments

Considering the nature of the game, it is understandable why it cannot be translated into eSports. However, GTA V is not empty (far from it) and the community has taken it upon itself to organize small events/tournaments for the player base. They are nothing too crazy, but they are legit, prizes can be won (not always though) and they are a lot of excellent fun!

On game.tv, 67 community-hosted tournaments have been organized.

(Source: game.tv)

• There are a total of 20 countries represented as the host of each tournament.
• Tournaments can be organized in 15 different languages.

Considering that players can craft their own and that Rockstar actually has added different gameplay modes in GTA Online, it is a bit bizarre that the company is not organizing tournaments in-game. Sure, they have all those side-missions and achievements, but tournaments are a whole different ballpark. Websites like game.tv are beneficial since they help the community organize itself properly. And the prizes are proper: vouchers for Amazon or Steam, prize money in in-game currency, expensive items from the game, etc. Some hosts also look for participants on forums like Reddit.

To sum up

People were hoping for something new about GTA VI after the Game Award, but because Rockstar intends to release the game on PS5 and Xbox Series, that will not happen for a while. Plus, as said before, those versions will come with a good number of perks bringing even more players. Rockstar has even neglected the main campaign in favor of the online mode, keeping it updated and always active 24/7. The main campaign received no DLC at all: we usually get a new scenario that way, but this time, nada!

However, it is not like it will be easy for Rockstar; fans already complained about the quality of the trailer they have released showcasing the game on new-gen consoles, so they have some work waiting for them until March 2022. Maybe by then, Rockstar will also think about organizing some tournaments on a bigger scale as right now, players play on maps they have created (which is still a big thing). All in all, there is not much to reproach to GTA V/GTA Online: Rockstar pretty much knows its stuff. Except with remastered versions: please, do better than the GTA Trilogy.