Stealing the Show

The launch of Grand Theft Auto 4 was a huge event for the industry. By several measures, the game has outdone its predecessors handily. The NPD Group has been gracious enough to provide us with historical data to compare GTA4 to Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

First, we can compare just the sales recorded by NPD during the first monthly reporting period that each game was on the market. The first three games were originally released exclusively on the PlayStation 2, so the data for those games in the next two graphs correspond only to that version's launch data. The data for GTA4 combines the sales figures for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.

 



Launching in October 2001, only a year into the life of the PlayStation 2, GTA3 sold more than a quarter million copies during its first monthly period. On the hype and praise generated by GTA3, Vice City sold over 1.4 million copies during its first period in October 2002. By the time San Andreas launched in October 2004, the PlayStation 2 was a runaway hit platform and the GTA series was a hot property. In only five days San Andreas sold over 2 million copies. GTA4 sold 2.85 million copies in its first period on the market, setting an impressive new record, even compared to its predecessors.

 
As amazing as those figures are, they do not tell the whole story. The figures cited above actually correspond to slightly different numbers of days on the market. If we compute a daily rate for each title during its opening days, the new picture is this:

 


Roughly speaking, the daily rate of sales for Vice City was ten times that of GTA3. The daily rate for San Andreas was more than twice that of Vice City. And GTA4's rate was nearly 39% higher than the rate for San Andreas. Put another way, GTA4 sold nearly 27 times more copies per day during its launch than did GTA3 during its launch.

 
One could also ask: What percentage of people who owned a PS2 when each GTA game launched actually purchased that game during its first month on the market? The answers are: 6% for GTA3, 12% for Vice City, and 8% for San Andreas.

 
For GTA4, we would ask what percentage of people who owned a PS3 or Xbox 360 also purchased the game during its first month on the market? The answer is very impressive: 20% of system owners bought the game. That is, 1 out of every 5 owners of a PS3 or Xbox 360 also has a copy of GTA4. If GTA4 sales remain strong during the next couple of months, we can expect that attach rate to rise.

 
Starting as a DOS game in 1997, the Grand Theft Auto series has been out for over a decade. During that time, it has sold nearly 36 million units of software in the United States alone. The titles prior to GTA4 accounted for 33 million of that total, which means that of all GTA software ever sold, 8% of it was sold during the last 5 days of the April 2008 reporting period.

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