There is a strange thing happening in gaming right now. In the same month that fans are pre-ordering the most anticipated video game of all time, they are also still buying — and playing — a game that came out in 2013. That game is Grand Theft Auto V, and thirteen years after launch, it is not fading quietly into retirement. It is breaking its own records.
A number that stops people cold
As of Take-Two Interactive’s spring 2026 earnings disclosure, GTA V has shipped more than 230 million copies worldwide, second only to Minecraft among the best-selling games ever made. What makes that figure remarkable is not the total — it is the pace. The game routinely sells around 5 million copies every quarter, and analysts estimate it still moves roughly 20 million units a year, more than a decade after release.
To put that in perspective: GTA V has sold more copies of a single game than Nintendo has shipped Switch consoles. It has outsold Tetris as a standalone title, buried Red Dead Redemption 2, and it did all of this without ever launching on mobile — spanning three console generations purely on the strength of re-releases and word of mouth.
Most games peak at launch and decline. GTA V did the opposite. Its strongest sales year since 2013 came in 2020, seven years after it first appeared on shelves.
The billion-dollar engine underneath
The real story isn’t the box sales — it’s what happens after you press “Play Online.”
GTA Online, the multiplayer world bolted onto the game two weeks after launch in October 2013, has become one of the most durable live-service economies in the industry. It still draws an estimated 18 million monthly active players, and Take-Two reported that recurrent spending — its polite term for microtransactions — actually grew year-over-year in fiscal 2026, on a game old enough to be in middle school.
That money matters for a reason bigger than any single quarter: it is what paid for the wait. Rockstar didn’t need to rush GTA 6 out in 2021, or 2023, or even 2025, because Los Santos was still printing money. The thirteen-year gap between installments was, in effect, funded by the previous game’s own success — a luxury almost no other studio has ever had.
One last heist before the sequel
Here’s the twist nobody quite expected. With GTA 6 on the horizon, you’d assume Rockstar would leave the old game alone. Instead, in July 2026 they dropped one of the largest updates in the game’s history: The Kortz Center Heist.
Set in a prestigious art gallery perched in the hills of Pacific Bluffs, the new multi-stage heist tasks players with buying an Art Studio for their in-game mansion, casing the complex, then choosing how to infiltrate and escape with a collection of priceless works. It arrived alongside what Rockstar billed as the biggest sale in the game’s history — a free Bunker property, record discounts across nearly every vehicle category, and stacks of bonus in-game cash tied to the new content.
It’s a curious gift: a farewell present to a game that, by every commercial logic, should already be finished.
The shadow of what’s coming
All of this is happening under the enormous shadow of GTA 6, now firmly dated for November 19, 2026 — a week before Black Friday — on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Rockstar has confirmed an $80 standard edition and a $100 ultimate edition, and one analyst estimated the sequel could sell up to 45 million copies on PS5 in its first week alone. Reports suggest Rockstar spent well over two billion dollars building it.
When that game lands, GTA V’s incredible run will finally start to slow. Players will migrate. Los Santos will empty, one lobby at a time.
But that’s exactly what makes this moment worth noticing. Right now, in the summer of 2026, both games briefly exist in the same window — the aging king still on the throne, the successor already at the door. Few pieces of entertainment ever get a send-off like this: still selling millions, still pulling in millions of players, still receiving brand-new content, all in the final months before its replacement arrives.
Thirteen years is an eternity in gaming. GTA V spent almost all of it at the top. And it’s leaving on its own terms.
