UK's Top-Selling Grand Theft Auto Games Revealed

The Grand Theft Auto series is one of the most successful franchises in the UK, with only FIFA, Call of Duty, and Mario surpassing it in terms of sales. Despite having fewer mainline entries and spin-offs compared to these other franchises, GTA has managed to generate significant revenue. In fact, the series is more successful than LEGO, Star Wars, and Pokémon, which rank fifth, sixth, and seventh, respectively. This assessment is based solely on revenue from physical game sales, with data provided by GfK. Grand Theft Auto 5 is the best-selling game in the series, generating £94 million in revenue within its first five days of release in September 2013. This figure is equivalent to the lifetime revenue of GTA 4, and GTA 5 has gone on to sell three times as many copies as its predecessor, based on physical sales alone. As a result, GTA 5 is the UK's best-selling game of all time, in terms of boxed sales. Interestingly, the game has sold slightly more copies on PS4 and Xbox One than on its original Xbox 360 and PS3 platforms, although it generated more revenue on the latter. The first Grand Theft Auto game was released in the UK in November 1997 for PC and later for PS1, but it was not an immediate success, ranking 35th and 7th in the charts, respectively. However, the game's popularity grew over time, with only 2% of its sales coming from the first week. The series gained momentum with the release of Grand Theft Auto 3 in October 2001, which sold more than the first two games combined and reached number one in the UK Top 40. The subsequent release of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002 continued the series' success, also reaching number one and ending FIFA 2003's three-week run at the top of the charts. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, released in 2004, was an even bigger success, selling more than its predecessors and remaining the second most successful GTA game in UK chart history. The series has since continued to grow, with the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 in 2008, which launched on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and Grand Theft Auto 5 in 2013, which has become the best-selling game in the series. Other notable releases in the series include Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories for the PSP, as well as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS. With the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto 6 in 2025, the series is poised to continue its success, having already spanned three generations of platforms and with constant updates to GTA Online.