Essays 08 May 2023, 11:06

What's the Most Popular Game? List of Most-played Video Games

Call of Duty, Minecraft, or Red Dead Redemption 2? The most popular games in the world are much less obvious than it might seem to regular players.

GTA 5

Scale of popularity:

nearly 170 million copies sold;
almost 20 million players in March 2023 (source).

The first two installments of the GTA series sold solidly, but they were still not entries that somehow stood out from the crowd. Great recognition came only with the third part, moving the series into 3D and starting the trend of open-world action games. Subsequent installments of the series systematically developed the ideas from part three, turning Grand Theft Auto into a pop culture phenomenon. GTAV in 2013, on the other hand, added to the pot a heavily expanded online mode... and it broke the bank.

Just 24 hours after its debut, Grand Theft Auto V generated more than $800 million in revenue through more than 11 million copies sold. Within a year, 34 million units of the game had been distributed, and sales continued unabated in the following years, with the latest figures showing 170 million copies distributed by August 2022. That's a phenomenal result, and when you consider that direct sales aren't even Rockstar's main source of earnings, as far more revenue is generated by the wildly popular online mode, the vision of an absolute giant emerges.

Although we do not know the official data on the number of active players on all platforms (we can only see that there are 90 to 120 thousand players on Steam per day), GTA V becoming available for free on the Epic Games Store in the first half of 2020 had a very positive impact on its popularity. Same as its release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. So it is one of the most popular games of our time – and it should remain so until GTA 6 comes.

More about Grand Theft Auto V

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GTA 5