Rockstar Games has finally confirmed that it is working towards developing the next entry in the GTA franchise.
While fans are happy with this news, they continue to wonder what took the gaming publisher so long to make the decision of introducing a new game in the franchise. Grand Theft Auto V was launched in 2013 and by the time the next GTA game (it has not been given a title so far) comes around, the former will complete a decade of its release.
Well, as it turns out, Rockstar Games kept delaying the prospect of developing a new game in the GTA franchise as they wanted to keep milking out the popularity of Grand Theft Auto V. The game continues to sell a large number of copies across the world and that’s the reason Rockstar Games didn’t want to divert the attention of the gamers towards a new game.
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As per the recent earnings report of Take-Two Interactive, Grand Theft Auto V has managed to sell as many as 160 million copies across all the platforms it has been made available on. Till the last quarter of 2021, the GTA franchise has sold 370 million copies. So, the figures registered by GTA 5 are huge by every possible account.
The earnings report points also out that GTA V has emerged as the highest-selling game in the last 10 years in the United States. No other game matches up to it both in terms of unit and dollar sales. With 43 million units, Red Dead Redemption 2 has become the second best-selling game in the United States in the last 3 years.
The kind of success GTA 5 has seen coming its way is both spectacular and rare. Even Rockstar Games, while launching it 9 years back, would not have anticipated for it to leave such a huge mark in the gaming space. James Schreier, a prominent gaming journalist, put up a post on Twitter wherein he compared the sales of other popular games with that of GTA 5.
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Before Valhalla registered record sales, the Assassin’s Creed franchise had managed to sell 155 million copies. So, barring Valhalla, GTA V has gone beyond the sales of every other game in this franchise. Till December 2021, 123 million copies of Resident Evil had been sold throughout the world. Ever since it was launched in 1987, the Final Fantasy series has registered sales of 164 million copies.