Games

6 mindblowing GTA Online stats

These stats prove Rockstar’s multiplayer sensation is the biggest heist of all time.

Written by Ben Sillis

4 min readPublished on 24.03.2017 · 13:00 UTC

No two ways about it: Grand Theft Auto V is a monster, straddling console generations and hovering near the top of the charts for more than three and a half years now. No other developer has built an open-world action game that has proved so persistently popular, so timeless, has even come close. For many PC, PlayStation and Xbox gamers, it’s the game they keep coming back to whenever they tire of the latest Hot New Thing. Just one more heist, just one more race.

Much of that of course is down to a game mode not even available when GTA V first launched: multiplayer. In the years since, GTA Online has evolved to become, for many, the core of the game. The excellent single-player campaign and any hopes of any further story DLC long forgotten and rightly so. By relentlessly adding new features and modes and organising events to draw players back in, Rockstar have created their own licence to print money – reportedly as much as US$13.5 million per week, and the figure may still be climbing.

So just how big is GTA Online now? With the recent release of the latest Cunning Stunts update, we thought we’d take stock. Allow us to provide some metaphorical bananas for scale with these bewildering figures.

US$700m

How much revenue Rockstar Games has generated from the GTA franchise in a year, from mid 2015 to mid 2016, as revealed by the company on an earnings call. That’s a staggering US$58m per month, or US$13.5m per week.

Granted, this figure is likely to include long-tail sales of GTA V itself, but beyond that is almost certainly all related to GTA Online purchases alone (by April 2016, Rockstar revealed it had earned US$500m from GTA Online micro-transactions alone since launch, a staggering number).

It’s admittedly not even close to the US$1b of revenue generated by Pokémon Go in 2016, but that was a newly released free-to-play mobile game, and not a three-year-old console title that'll still set you back US$60 just to start playing.

90,074

The peak number of players playing GTA Online on Steam in March at one time. That’s a huge, thriving community, especially when you consider this is just one out of five possible platforms you can play on (PC, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3).

To put that in perspective, this is the equivalent of two football stadiums worth of gamers all playing at once, or the inhabitants of one small real-world city all carrying out heists together in Los Santos.

Even more astonishing? An analysis of Steam Charts data shows that this is more people playing than were playing this time two years ago.

483 days

The amount of real-world days (not GTA’s rapid cycle in-game days), according to GTA Stats, that one gamer, RAMZKILLA, has spent playing GTA Online. That’s around 16 months of non-stop playing, which is remarkable when you consider that GTA Online has only been available for 43 months. Subtract out the time hopefully spent sleeping, eating and earning a living, and it’s safe to say that GTA Online isn’t just a diversion or a hobby for some: it’s a way of life.

$1.4t

GTA Online is now so big it has its own set of oligarchs. That figure is the highest amount of in-game money earned by any one player, according to GTA Stats. Yep, trillion. Yep, that’s 12 zeroes. It’s also enough to buy 717,948 Pegassi Osiris supercars at $1.95m a pop, or if you’re feeling in a particularly bad mood, 93 million miniguns from Ammu-Nation.

33.8m

The number of players who have logged onto GTA Online, according to Rockstar Games. That’s roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Canada (36m) including the young, the elderly and those who’ve never so much as touched a Dualshock, all playing GTA Online.

According to the same report, those same gamers have helped form 3.7m crews, and together played more than 5.9b jobs. Even more astounding? This data is from late 2014, meaning that newcomers during the last two and a half years have pushed these figures up far higher – GTA V has in fact sold more than 70m copies worldwide, so if three quarters of players have tried the online mode, that number could more like 52m GTA Online players.

224 countries

The number of countries Rockstar says gamers have logged onto GTA Online from. This is a pretty remarkable stat when you consider there are only 193 member nations of the United Nations, and only a handful of countries beyond that. Rockstar is probably being pretty generous with its definition of the term ‘country’, but nonetheless, it does highlight just how global a phenomenon the game has become.