GTA Remastered Trilogy Was Reportedly A Success Despite The Technical Issues

The GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition, which launched back in November, landed with a whole host of technical issues that earned plenty of criticism from fans (and us). But that doesn’t seem to have stopped it from selling very, very well.

Take-Two just gave its quarterly earnings report, during which the company said the trilogy, “significantly exceed[ed] our commercial expectations.” That’s nice to hear, even if it doesn’t really tell the whole story, as companies can essentially set whatever metrics they want internally and then say a game exceeded them.

But a bit of clever math on the part of VGC might have gotten at its actual sales metrics. Take-Two reported that the entire GTA series to date has sold over 370 million copies, while GTA V has sold over 160 million on its own as of the quarter’s end in January. That’s up from the numbers they reported last quarter of 355 million for the series, and 155 million for GTA V alone. If you look back at earnings reports from recent past quarters, it’s fairly consistent that GTA V’s sales line up exactly with overall series sales increases — but there’s a 10 million unit discrepancy.

With no other major GTA titles releasing during that period, that makes it reasonably likely that the GTA Trilogy was largely responsible for the remaining 10 million sales — and that’s just from its November release through December, not counting what it may have sold in January or the first week of February.

Despite its launch issues, Take-Two has been contrite both at launch and now and has committed to fixing the trilogy’s issues. It has already released some major updates, and more are on the way in the future. An eventual mobile release for Android and iOS is also still in the cards for the first half of this year. Meanwhile, an upgraded version of GTA V is headed to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on March 15.

Just last week, Rockstar Games revealed that a new GTA game was indeed in development, and though we didn’t get more details on it today, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick affirmed to IGN that Rockstar is fully in charge of the decision to reveal more information in the future.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.