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What is even more impressive about this figure is that it's just XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 sales. GTA V hasn't been announced for PC yet which is a severely underrated market when it comes to games I reckon. If GTA V launched with a PC version I think they would have eclipsed $1 billion in 24 hours, easily, if not 1.1.

I played this yesterday (I don't own a console) at a friends house and what they've been able to achieve on these consoles is impressive considering these consoles aren't next gen and are resource limited.

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It seems like that happens at every end of every console's life. Last of Us, BioShock Infinite, and GTA V are three fantastic games to close out the PS3.

I wonder if the developers get a real handle on the platform and squeezing the most out of it by the time it gets to EOL.

They must no doubt, given the specs on those systems.

eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specificatio...

A whopping 512mb of RAM to run GTA 5

I picked up my 360 in the launch month, and it's still running eight years later. Have to give them credit for that as I've put a lot of miles on the system.

>I picked up my 360 in the launch month, and it's still running eight years later.

Wow, I have had like 4 consoles, 2 original, elite and finally the slim. All but the slim RROD, to still have your launch edition is mighty impressive!

The earlier years of the 360 were plagued by RROD problems. I bought a second (original) console a few years in and had no problems.

My experience was that the RROD issues were sorted out well before the elite and slim 360s (worked in GameStop), so it's surprising you had problems with those versions.

I can confirm that the elite can RROD. I had two originals RROD and finally got a slim, my roommate had one elite and had to get a slim after his RROD'd.

Only problem I had was in 2007, I got the red ring of death, which Microsoft fixed. I picked up a 360 for my brother at the same time, and his is also still running perfectly (he managed to avoid the ring of death). I've never done anything particularly special for the care of the system, I keep it elevated off the floor, and it has always rested flat (for better or worse).

Bingo. Andy Gavin's blog about developing Crash Bandicoot covers some of the issues of developing for consoles.

I was just reading about this yesterday actually. Wiki mentions the tricks learnt from GTAIV were exploited to their full extent to make the best use of the hardware for GTAV.

> While both games were developed for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the team were able to render the world of Grand Theft Auto V with greater detail than in Grand Theft Auto IV because they had become familiar with the hardware over time. Art director Aaron Garbut opined that while the aging hardware of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were tiring to work with, "I think one of the most amazing features is the way we handle lighting in the game to maintain a consistent look despite the constraints on realistic lighting and shadows on current hardware", he explained.[28] Vice president Dan Houser agreed with this sentiment, explaining that working on Grand Theft Auto IV with relatively new hardware was difficult, but "now we know what the hardware's capable of, so it's become a lot easier to move things along and a lot more fun, too".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gta5#Development

Don't forget the experience they also gained with Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3.

Except Gran Turismo 6 (with completely rebuilt graphics and physics) is coming out this year. Metal Gear Solid V & Ground Zeroes are currently in development for the PS3, among other systems. Also we will still be getting multi-platform stuff for some time (Battlefield 4).

So it's too early to "close out the PS3" IMHO.

Not just this generation either. I remember being amazed at Perfect Dark and Donkey Kong 64, or, going even further back, Chrono Trigger.

True. Best example that comes to mind in recent memory for me is Resident Evil 4 on gamecube - nobody thought the GC could do that.

Assuming every PC copy sold is digital at $60 a pop the 70% publisher cut would be $42. To generate an extra $300,000,000 in revenue on PC it'd have to sell 7 million copies. No game in the history of ever has sold that many copies on day one on PC. And they especially haven't done that when the game is releasing on consoles at the same time.

It will however eventually release on PC and generate a nice chunk of change over a few years at various price points.

Why are you comparing gross revenue to profit? It would only take 3.3 million pre-sales to make up the $200 million to get to $1 billion/day. Diablo 3 reached that many sales on day 1, for example. Moreover, we're not talking about any random game, we're talking about this very specific game, GTA V, which has smashed existing sales records.

No game in the history of ever has sold that many copies on day one on PC.

No game in the history of ever has sold as many copies on Xbox 360 or PS3 as GTA V just has either, no? ;-)

That said, I think I agree with the inferred point that simultaneous PC release wouldn't have had a huge impact on revenue.

> No game in the history of ever has sold as many copies on Xbox 360 or PS3 as GTA V just has either, no? ;-)

Several blockbusters, such as Call of Duty, have sold more on consoles than GTA V currently has, just not on day 1.

Well, according to wikipedia, it took 5 days for COD:BO2 to earn $800M. Game grossed $500M on the first day.

You can only imagine what that game could look like if it were designed for PC and not decade old consoles with hardware that was mid-range when the consoles came out.

It sucks that every major game lately is just made for the lowest common denominator and then if we are lucky, we get a half assed PC port. Dear god what a mess GTA IV was and how many patches it took to actually get it to a workable state.

I still wait on a studio that actually takes enough pride in their work to develop something that really pushes the envelope of PC gaming. You could take that then and show even the "Next Gen" consoles what actually is possible nowadays if you don't go for the bargain basement.

You could if you target really high end PCs but a lot of the PC market is now laptops or people who don't want to upgrade every 6 months to a year.

There was a time when gaming PCs had to be upgraded regularly, but that hasn't been the case for years, now. My gaming rig was built about three years ago, and it should be able to go another one to two years before it will need an upgrade. And even then, the only upgrade it should need is a new video card (the GTX 460 that I have is sufficient, but it will eventually be a performance bottleneck).

I wonder how much consoles are to blame for that. Big studios that have the power to drive PC upgrades produce mainly for decade-old hardware, which is just peanuts by the standards of today's PCs.

The PS3 is nearly 7 years old and runs GTA V. Modern PCs could run GTA V just fine. In fact, it'd probably run better on the PC because they could just install the entire game to the hard drive (load times are a bit lengthy on the PS3 because of disc seek times).

Xbox one may actually live up to this...we'll see

>Dear god what a mess GTA IV was and how many patches it took to actually get it to a workable state.

Could be the reason they don't, but I expect piracy is the main reason it's not on the PC yet.

You do often see tech demos of engines that show of what can be done, but you develop for the market, which is the same for most technology (cough Internet Explorer cough)

News flash , AAA companies don't like to do PC releases because of all the piracy. Hell Let me be honest , every GTA games i had played till San Andreas on the PC was a cracked version. It wasn't that i wanted to get a crack , but the thing was that there was no other option available where i live.

> It wasn't that i wanted to get a crack , but the thing was that there was no other option available where i live.

Which brings us back to: Piracy is a market failure, not a cultural failure.

Theft is a market failure, not a cultural failure.

Repeat after me: piracy is not theft.

To be precise, "piracy" isn't even piracy. After all, it's not murder, kidnapping, and plunder on the high seas.

Thank you - you're quite right. I should have written, "copying isn't theft".

It shouldn't be a surprise to you that words can have more than one meaning.

This one is by design.

'Piracy' was defined as copyright violation by the copyright holders, not by general usage.

Therefore, we should fight that usage, just to compensate the balance.

I follow but disagree. The world's largest and most successful torrent site calls itself The Pirate Bay. There are political "Pirate Parties" in Canada and Sweden. It may have been a pejorative label initially, but file sharers have "owned" the name and made it their own.

That's exactly how language is defined; by popular usage, not by design.

Unfortunately your attempted reductio ad absurdum doesn't quite get to the absurdum point.

That is probably true. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that theft happens, by and large, due to poor access to drugs. If the drug market was more efficient, it is possible a lot of those theft crimes would go away.

Of course, theft and copyright infringement are not directly comparable, being quite different concepts.

Well if you think about it , the markets here could easily import the games ( they do import the PS3 games ) but they choose not to import PC games because they know it will be cracked in time. So basically it was in fact cultural failure which lead to market failure .

I'm failing to understand your point. Almost every version of GTA has been released on the PC. How was there no option where you lived? Are you meaning you couldn't purchase it at your local stores before mail-order was available?

You do realise this argument is null and void? GTA V for XBOX 360 leaked onto torrent websites days before the game was even officially released. If this is the argument companies are using for delaying the release of PC games or not releasing them at all, I think that's weak.

Look at Watch Dogs. Another open world hacker-esque game and it's coming out on consoles and PC on the same date. Rockstar are a much bigger company with more resources and bigger budgets to develop for multi-platforms. They are a console oriented company, but I remember when GTA was much bigger on PC than any console back in the 1,2 and 3 days especially.

Well, put it this way. If there are plans for next gen, we'll definitely get a PC person as they are effectively the same in many ways.

Not only PC, but I wonder if some people are waiting to see if this hits next gen consoles also.

My guess is their business plan was -- get it out for the tail end of the current gen consoles, then rake in cash a second time on a remastered edition when the next gen consoles are out in significant numbers.

I played it on PS3, the only downside is the FPS drop that occurs when driving at fast speeds... which is a fair payoff for the impressive visuals they have managed to achieve.

I wonder if they will/could just port to PS4 and up the textures, framerate, draw distance etc.

It could be that there is so much PS3 specific tricks in there it just wouldn't work.

This is odd, as I haven't found this on the xbox 360 at all, and I was under the impression that the ps3 was more powerful.

The question of which is more powerful is a difficult one if you get down to the nitty-gritty... but I'd have to say the best snap answer is that in general, the XBox 360 actually has a narrow advantage in most ways. The PS3 has a particular advantage in a certain type of computation, but if you can't make maximal use of that for some reason, the XBox 360 wins.

The idea that the PS3 has some sort of huge advantage is mostly Sony propaganda, and people who don't get that "Cell" doesn't mean something magic that makes everything faster, it means something more like "overoptimized for a particular use case" that only makes certain very narrow tasks faster.

Now I can finally justify this point I've made before with this: There is a reason the PS4 is fleeing the Cell architecture just as fast as its metaphorical feet can take it. If companies, like politicians, weren't obligated to put on a public facade that says they never make mistakes, they would admit that it was an error and never really panned out the way they hoped (to say nothing of what they claimed!). As it is, if you read in between the lines a bit in this presentation, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHXrBnipHyA , the PS4 lead came about as close as he politically could to admitting it. (Props to him. The PS4 is looking really solid to me, and I think that is essentially 100% because of this guy.)

I've had it on the xbox. To be fair, it's not a huge drop and you won't notice it often. But if you start to focus on certain buildings or the like you can see the stutter

Release it on PC and keep your finger crossed while a cracker team cracks the drm and releases it on a torrent site.

yeah and thats exactly the reason we all migrated to consoles, pc gaming age is over just b'cas of those crackers, the all industry is useless without online network mode games - so that games would not be cracked.

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