GTA V sales figures: 145m sales, at least 10m sales a year since 2013

Here's a closer look at Grand Theft Auto franchise sales ahead of Take-Two Interactive's upcoming Q1 FY22 earnings call.

Grand Theft Auto is the fifth best-selling franchise in the games industry with 345 million total sales. Grand Theft Auto V makes up 42% of total franchise sales with an astronomical 145 million units shipped worldwide.

I've compiled data from Take-Two earnings call transcripts since Grand Theft Auto V's launch in 2013 (which coincides with the company's FY2014 period). The data isn't perfect and contains some estimates based on previous sales trends.

The results are incredible. Grand Theft Auto V has managed to sell at least 10 million copies every single year since launch. In fact in FY2020, almost seven years since the game launched, GTA V managed to sell a whopping 21 million copies digitally and physically.

Below is a quick list showing how many copies GTA V sold across each fiscal period:

• FY14 - 33 million
• FY15 - 18 million
• FY16 - 14 million
• FY17 - 16 million
• FY18 - 15 million
• FY19 - 13 million
• FY20 - 21 million
• FY21 - 15 million

The staying power of Grand Theft Auto V has made it the single most popular entertainment product on the planet. Not only are game sales up to astronomical proportions, but the franchise regularly churns out hundreds of millions in digital cashflows with its GTA Online multiplayer component (the game made $985 million in FY2021 alone, accounting for 29% of Take-Two's total net revenues). We'll have more on the actual earnings of Grand Theft Auto V in another article. For now we're going to look at actual game sales data.

It helps that GTA V will release on four platforms across an 8-year span, including Xbox 360/PS3, Xbox One/PS4, PC, and in November it'll be re-released for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 with next-gen optimizations.

We've also compiled Red Dead Redemption II lifetime sales growth, and you can find that here.

These numbers are set to climb even higher when GTA V gets re-released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.

Take-Two has repeatedly said it expects GTA V and GTA Online sales and revenues to moderate, but that shows no signs of happening any time soon.

The company will reveal the latest sales figures and earnings during its upcoming Q1 Fiscal Year 2022 earnings report this Monday, August 2.