Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V launched in a big way on Steam. The early stats are showing that the game is already moving massive copies and more than 300,000 players have already logged in simultaneously for the open-world action game.
According to GamesIndustry.biz, more than 300,000 active gamers logged in and started playing GTA V the day it launched. The second day of launch also saw the game scoring more than 300,000 concurrent users on the service, trumping Bethesda's Skyrim by a fair margin, as noted by GamesIndustry.biz...
“The previous record for most concurrent users was Bethesda's Skyrim back in 2011, which had 280,000 Steam players after selling more than 3.5 million units across PC and console in its first two days.”
In addition to this, GamingBolt is reporting that the stats from the GamesIndustry.biz affiliate SteamSpy has indicated that the game has already sold more than a million copies after it first launched.
The sales stats shouldn't be too surprising to anyone given that GTA V was already topping the charts on Steam week in and week out since March. We saw a similar kind of flurry when DayZ finally became available on Steam in the Early Access mode, where everyone was trying to get in on the action after the hype trained pulled into the station.
It's understandable in the case of GTA V despite arriving on PC two years after Rockstar initially launched the game on the Xbox 360 and PS3. The game brings with it tons of new content opportunities for those playing on PC, including the ability to mod the game beyond its original capabilities. There's also the new 4K resolution graphics option and – if your computer is up to par – the ability to play the game at 60 frames per second.
The PC version of the game also sports the new Rockstar video editor that enables gamers to put together their own machinima in ways that completely trumps the previous editor in GTA IV.
It should be noted that the launch for the title hasn't been the smoothest. There's still an issue regarding the game's usernames in Windows that caused some problems with the updates, preventing some gamers from being able to get in on the action. However, Rockstar did offer an alternative way to fix the problem by making a brand new username without any characters that were causing a hiccup in the Rockstar updater. They definitely have a fix on the way for the game, so don't sweat over the problem for too long.
GTA V has already sold millions of copies on the Xbox 360, PS3, PS4 and Xbox One. At this juncture Rockstar is just cleaning up on the PC crowd with the little extra trinkets of goodies tossed in for good measure. And seeing the concurrent user rating that high so shortly after release means that a lot of gamers definitely made good on the pre-loading option that went live on April 7th.
You can pick up a digital copy of GTA V right now from participating distributors.
