Grand Theft Auto V turns 10 today. With more than 185 million copies sold, GTA V is – in absolute figures – the second best-selling video game in history only behind Minecraft. But this is not news. In fact, this has been the case for many years. It is also not news to claim that GTA V has been the best-selling game of the last decade. Although, if we went back to September 2013, surely few would dare to make such statements. It was clear that Grand Theft Auto V would be a bestseller, but to what extent?
For the first time in the franchise, GTA V featured three different protagonists: Michael, Franklin, and crazy Trevor. In addition, the action returned to Los Santos – a parody of Los Angeles –, the same city from Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. The promises of freedom and epic were gigantic. I still remember – and this is neither a joke nor an exaggeration – the voice-over from one of the game's trailers. “With Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar has tried to reinvent the open-world game in different ways…” the video began.
At that time I was 14 years old and a couple of months ago I had reserved the special edition of the game – it cost 80 euros! – with a metal case for Xbox 360. That summer, 2013, I spent it watching the game trailers one after another: the ones presenting each character, the first trailer with gameplay, the one for GTA Online… In addition, hundreds of channels on YouTube analyzing each of the videos to predict what this great GTA V would be like.
In just three days on sale, Grand Theft Auto V generated more than $1 billion and, during its first week in stores, sold 16 million units. This shattered any previous record and placed GTA V as the largest launch of an entertainment product in history. In fact, in just six weeks, Rockstar Games had already distributed 29 million units, more than all of GTA IV's sales.
The hype, as they say, was through the roof. Or, at least, I had it through the roof. Between the game's launch in mid-September and Christmas I played too many hours of GTA V, but mostly I played GTA Online. The online experience proposed by Rockstar Games was simple: do the same as in the campaign mode, but with friends. It was perfect, although the launch was quite torturous.
It was with the launch of GTA Online, in fact, that broken online games began to become fashionable, with server problems that took days to solve. The official publication of the online mode was on October 1, but Rockstar Games needed more than a week to solve the errors so that it could be played properly.
I remember that, by chance, I met a very nice boy my age through GTA Online. His name was Miguel Ortiz and he was from Andalusia. I haven't heard from him in about eight years. We played every afternoon doing races and missions while we talked on the Xbox Live Party. There came a point where I got off the car, left my Grand Theft Auto Online character, and left the city of Los Santos. I don't know exactly when it was, but what I experienced was just the beginning.
I deduce that this little story is reduced to the end of 2013 and, perhaps, to all of 2014. But now, in the middle of 2023, GTA Online is still more alive than ever. The great success of Rockstar Games was the free content expansions, which have expanded and modified the game to what it is now. More vehicles, more apartments to buy, more missions, jobs, the possibility of creating criminal gangs... GTA V was born as an extremely ambitious adventure, but GTA Online consolidated the game-as-a-service model and marked a before and after in the form of make multiplayer titles.
Entering the city of Los Santos today has nothing to do with how it was in 2013. The game has not stopped evolving and its community has been growing and changing. I got off the wagon, but many millions of other people have gotten on during these 10 years. GTA V has versions for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 and PC. Three generations of consoles and as many players.
The life cycles of video games in stores typically last a few months. There are exceptions – especially in free titles – and the phenomenon can last for even a few years. This is the case of Fortnite, League of Legends or Roblox. But Grand Theft Auto V is the only video game that for 10 years has managed to sneak into the lists of best-selling games every month. This is something that, in Spain, only usually happens with some Nintendo titles.
But this whole beautiful success story also has its negative side. Since 2013, Rockstar Games has only published one big title: Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018. October will mark five years since its launch. There have also been minor games like Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition in November 2021. A game that came out completely broken and that was practically an insult to the original titles. And, among all this, players continue to wonder where GTA VI is.
With Grand Theft Auto VI several things happen. On the one hand, there is the goose that lays the golden eggs that is GTA Online, a game that continues to generate millions of dollars a year with hardly any costs. Why launch a new game on the market, a game that has cost hundreds of millions to develop, and take a risk if what is already there works like a charm?
And on the other hand there are expectations. GTA V has been such a great success and people remember it with so much affection – despite all the deserved criticism it received at the time – that it is almost impossible to surpass it with a new installment. GTA VI cannot allow itself to be a good game, it has to be perfect: a masterpiece that revolutionizes the sector. Anything less than this could be seen as a failure.
The combination of these two factors helps to understand why GTA V is a title that has jumped between three generations of consoles. When before the most normal thing was to have a couple of installments of the franchise per generation. This is not to mention that, in recent years, development costs have increased greatly. Wondering what would have happened to GTA VI if GTA Online had not succeeded is part of the realm of imagination, but it is easy to deduce that they probably would have already published it.
In recent years, especially since the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and thanks to phenomena like Marbella Vice, roleplaying in GTA Online has become very fashionable. This basically consists of specialized servers where players interpret – role – a specific character within the city of Los Santos, be it a gangster, a police officer or a taxi driver, among many other options.
Recently, Rockstar Games has bought the company in charge of developing and maintaining these roleplay servers and this opens up new possibilities for GTA VI and its respective online mode. Far from being obsolete and in decline, GTA V and GTA Online continue to function like a shot, with a lively and active community and receiving regular updates with new content.
It is difficult to predict when the GTA V phenomenon will end and give way to GTA VI, although it should not be long before we officially know Rockstar Games' intentions. In fact, the company's latest fiscal report suggests that the new Grand Theft Auto could be published within a maximum period of 20 months, specifically during the fiscal year of 2025, which runs from April 2024 to March of the following year. But, in the meantime, the action continues in Los Santos.
Already in 2013, our analysis of Grand Theft Auto V ended with this paragraph that, 10 years later, has turned out to be very premonitory: “At the expense of verifying the reception that will be received by what rumors place as the largest launch of an entertainment product of Throughout history, one wonders how it is possible that something as completely "popular" as GTA can also be a product capable of delving into so many topics and controversies that not even most indie games dare to address. It is difficult to find an answer to this strange phenomenon. Finally, a few words from Douf Lowenstein, the founder of the North American Entertainment Software Association, who a decade ago said that GTA was "a creative work capable of defining the new era of a budding industry." It is something that is still totally valid today.”
