Rockstar's urban opus, Grand Theft Auto 5, has made more money than any other entertainment product ever released. That's the word from market analysts, who do sums like this just for fun.
The news comes from a story on financial site MarketWatch, which claims that GTA 5 has now topped a staggering six billion dollars in revenue since it launched in 2013. That includes not just sales of the game itself, but money spent on its GTA Online component which remains phenomenally popular.
This puts GTA 5 far ahead of potential rivals not just in gaming, but across all entertainment media. Even the biggest blockbuster movies, such as the original Star Wars in 1977, struggle to top $4bn even when adjusted for inflation and including home entertainment releases. Of course, it helps that a new video game costs roughly three or four times as much as a movie ticket, Blu-ray disc, book or music album.
In terms of units shifted, GTA 5 still lags behind titans like Minecraft and Tetris which have been around longer, and are available on many more platforms. The fact that GTA 5 is still selling - it was still the sixth biggest seller in the US in 2017, four years after release - is remarkable enough, but as the Wu Tang taught us, cash rules everything around me and Rockstar's parent company Take Two Interactive has to be happy with this massive haul.
Will Rockstar's next blockbuster, Red Dead Redemption 2, do similar business when it drops this October? Only a fool would bet against it, and we've already seen other big games shift their release dates to get out of the path of the studio's long-awaited western sequel.
