Grand Theft Auto V is the highest selling unbundled game of all time at retail, having sold over 50 million copies. The interesting thing is just how little of its overall success seems to be coming from the long awaited and much vaunted PC version of the game, which finally went on sale earlier this year, over a year and a half after the game first launched.According to the unofficial Steam sales tracker SteamSpy, the game has sold 3 million copies on Steam.
That’s not a whole lot, and makes you wonder of companies like Rockstar may not be right in pursuing consoles over PC for mass market AAA games, but there are a few factors to consider:
- The PC version is not sold exclusively through Steam- it is also sold through the Rockstar Social Club, and third party outlets like GMG also sell the game. These sales will not be included in the SteamSpy stats.
- The long time period between the console launches of GTA5, and its eventual PC release may have had something to do with these low sales- either many PC players simply lost interest and move don to other games (for instance, Cities Skylines launched earlier this year at the same time as GTA5), or they had already played one of the console versions, rendering a purchase of the PC version unnecessary.
- While GTA5 was a great port, Rockstar’s policies around the PC release, specifically pertaining to mods, may have led to bad word of mouth around the PC release, which stalled sales.
3 million is nothing to sneeze at, in any case, and has probably more than justified the investment in the PC port for Rockstar- I just wonder how the game would have done had it launched in a reasonable timeframe on PC.