Grand Theft Auto 5 is taking out sales records with reckless abandon, and now it’s officially the UK’s fastest selling game across an opening week. Chart-Track notes the PS3 and Xbox 360 game sold almost 250,000 more copies than Black Ops did in its first week, the Call of Duty game shifting around 2 million. The Super Joystiq Super Calculator (patent pending) tells us that means GTA 5 is somewhere near the 2.25 million mark – wowzers!
That’s in the UK alone, we stress to underline, where the population is just over 63 million. That’s a whole lot of one country people playing a video game. That said, it’s not like they’re the only ones; GTA 5 sales surpassed a cool $1 billion worldwide at the top of the weekend.
If you need more eye-popping stats: GTA 5 is already the 24th biggest-selling game in the UK, its launch week sales outsold those of GTA 4 by a factor of 2.4, and it’s sold more in its first week than all the other GTA games did combined. All done? Good, let’s move on.
Topping the other newsbits from the UK charts is Pro Evo 2014, the soccer sim coming in 2nd in its debut week as it looks to beat FIFA 14 to as much of the punch (kick?) as possible – EA’s game comes out this week. The rest of the top ten is kind of oddball: The Last of Us moves up from 25th to 3rd thanks to hardware bundles, while Aliens: Colonial Marines re-enters the top 40 in 9th thanks to a retailer offer. Elsewhere, Harvest Moon: A New Beginning starts up in 22nd.
To provide some perspective, four percent of this week’s UK sales came from chart entries 2-10. If you’ll indulge us on one last GTA 5 stat, Rockstar’s game notched 57 percent of this week’s sales on Xbox 360, and 43 percent on PS3. It’s that kind of week, folks.
Top 10 UK Software Sales (All Formats); week ending September 21:
- Grand Theft Auto 5
- Pro Evolution Soccer 2014
- The Last of Us
- Saints Row 4
- Splinter Cell: Blacklist
- Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
- Diablo 3
- Disney Infinity
- Aliens: Colonial Marines
- Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix
