How many copies has Grand Theft Auto V sold?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the all-time leader and work down. The best-selling game ever sits in the hundreds of millions, and the next tier sits below it but well clear of the ordinary blockbusters, which top out in the tens of millions. That bracket puts this title in the low hundreds of millions, and anchoring on the record is more reliable than estimating in isolation.

The reason the total is so high is longevity rather than a launch. As the explanation says, it shipped across three console generations and was kept alive for more than a decade by its online mode, so it kept selling to new hardware owners long after the usual sales curve would have flattened. Games with persistent online modes have a fundamentally different sales shape, and this one was still selling steadily with its own sequel only months away.

One caution on the word used: publishers report units sold-in — shipped to retailers or sold digitally — rather than copies bought by players, and the two differ by whatever sits in retail channels. The revenue comparison with films in the explanation is also apples to oranges in one respect — a game at full price generates far more revenue per unit than a cinema ticket, so unit counts and revenue rankings are different lists.