"Grand Theft Auto V," the fifth installment of the videogame that became a focal point of debate about gratuitous violence and explicit content in the media, came out guns blasting with $800 million in global first-day sales.
Take-Two Interactive Software Inc's most lucrative franchise went on sale at midnight on Tuesday.
The sales figure marked a first-day record for the Grand Theft Auto series in which players freely roam, mainly via automobiles, in a game world based on real-life locations such as Los Angeles.
Take-Two shares closed up 1.2 percent at $17.20. The stock has climbed 12 percent since July when the company raised its fiscal 2014 forecast and the buzz grew louder around the game's September release.
Retail revenues of $800 million would translate to sales of about 13 million to 14 million units of the game, analysts estimated.
"The last major Grand Theft Auto title sold just under 13 million in the course of the year. This did that in a day," said Daniel Ernst, an analyst at Hudson Square Research. The sales beat his expectations.
The 16-year-old Grand Theft Auto franchise has won numerous awards and become embedded in popular culture over the years. The criminal drama and action-adventure series has also stirred its share of controversy over the violent and adult nature of its content.
The game, which costs $60, has been given a "Mature" rating by the industry group that ratesvideo game content in the U.S, meaning it can only be purchased by gamers older than 17.
"Grand Theft Auto IV" was released in 2008, and gamers had eagerly awaited the fifth installment. It took more than five years to be developed by Take-Two's Rockstar Games studio, at a cost of between $200 million and $250 million, according to some analysts' estimates.
The debut now ranks as among the industry's strongest. Last year, Activision Blizzard Inc's "Call Of Duty: Black Ops II" raked in $500 million on its first day.
Other blockbuster titles from top-selling franchises such as "Call of Duty" and Nintendo's "Mario" games sell more than 20 million copies in a year, Ernst said.
"We're looking for 23 million units of games sold by March 2014 and we won't change that, but $800 million in the first day is phenomenal," said Mike Hickey, an analyst at the Benchmark Company.
DOES IT HAVE LEGS?
Game fans flocked to retail stores around the world at midnight before the game's release on Tuesday. Analysts had estimated that more than 7 million units had been pre-ordered before the release.
"Grand Theft Auto V" is available on Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 consoles, owned by over 160 million gamers.
The video game industry, which has been struggling with flagging sales, is awaiting the November release of Microsoft Corp's Xbox One and Sony Corp's PlayStation 4, in the hope that new hardware will boost sales.
Take-Two has yet to announce a version of "Grand Theft Auto V" for those next-generation consoles. The arrival of the new technology could create a "friction point" for continued sales, Benchmark's Hickey said.
"The focus should now be about the sustainability and whether the title has legs," Arvind Bhatia, a Sterne Agee analyst, said. "Indications are it probably does, as critics and consumers love it, retailers are supporting it in a big way and the installed base of current-generation consoles is very large. But we'll have to see in coming weeks."
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Xbox Vs PS Comparison!
Today, Grand Theft Auto V was released for the PS3 and Xbox 360. Both versions of the game have been almost universally praised by reviewers and gamers alike. On a technological level, though, there are some differences between GTA 5 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. In an odd about-turn, where GTA 4 looked relatively awful on the PS3, Sony’s console actually plays GTA 5 with better graphics quality than the Xbox 360. There are some other small differences between the consoles, too. Let’s dive straight in.
GTA 5 installation: Xbox 360 vs. PS3
The first difference between the 360 and PS3 is the installation process. GTA 5 comes on two DVDs for the Xbox 360, and a single Blu-ray disc for the PS3. In both cases, the mandatory install is around 8GB. Rockstar is recommending that Xbox users do not install both the Install and Play discs, as it can cause performance degradation. It isn’t clear why running the game from the Play disc is faster than having it installed on the hard drive, but it’s probably just down to the game’s programming being optimized for optical drive data rates, rather than reading data from the hard drive.
GTA 5 graphics quality: Xbox 360 vs. PS3
Unlike GTA 4, where there was a huge difference between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, both consoles register almost identical graphics quality in GTA 5. PS3 users will note that GTA 5 looks a lot sharper than GTA 4, due to increasing the resolution of the frame buffer to 1280×720 (the same as the Xbox 360), and removal of the Vaseline blur that made the entire world look soft.
In side-by-side comparisons of both still screenshots and video, the GTA 5 looks almost identical on the PS3 and Xbox 360. There are some minor differences, such as slightly more detailed trees on the Xbox 360, and lower-quality mirror reflections on the PS3. The 360 also suffers from some texture-streaming issues, probably caused bandwidth limitations, which can cause some blurrier textures. Eurogamer notes that this issue can be ameliorated by installing the GTA 5′s Play disc to a USB flash drive.
Conclusion
Again, just as with GTA 4, a lot of the PS3′s performance issues have been addressed with GTA 5. The Xbox 360 still has a slight edge on the PS3 when it comes to performance in GTA 5, but for the most part both consoles stick solidly to the target of 30 frames per second. Both consoles dip to 20 fps on occasion, when there’s too many polygons on-screen, but there’s no real difference between the two.
All told, Grand Theft Auto 5 will look and perform almost equally on both the Xbox 360 and PS3. Overall, visual quality is slightly higher on the PS3, due to the Xbox’s texture streaming issues. It’s odd that, despite the huge architectural differences between the two consoles, the ultimate decider for the seventh generation’s magnum opus title, comes down to the Xbox’s weaker ability to stream textures from DVDs.