Grand Theft Auto V came out in September 2013. It has now sold over 200 million copies across three different console generations and PC. As of 2024 it is still showing up in monthly sales charts, still sitting in Steam's top sellers periodically, still the game that a certain type of person references when they want to describe an open world done right.
No other game in history has kept this up for this long. It's worth actually thinking about why rather than just noting that it happened.
Los Santos
The city is a big part of the answer. Los Santos is Rockstar's version of Los Angeles, built with a level of detail that was well ahead of what anyone else was doing in 2013 and that still holds up reasonably well today. The radio stations have original music, original presenters with their own running bits and arguments, and fake adverts that are genuinely funny if you catch them. Pedestrians have routines and react to things happening around them in ways that make them feel like they belong there. The geography runs from beach to desert to mountain to dense city centre without any of it feeling arbitrary or dropped in to fill space.
The thing that separates a good open world from a forgettable one is whether it feels like it exists independently of you. Los Santos mostly does. You can wander around for an hour not following any mission and still find things happening, still hear something funny on the radio, still get into a situation you didn't plan for. That quality doesn't age the way visual fidelity does.
Three Characters
GTA V's main structural idea was giving you three playable protagonists and letting you switch between them at will. Michael is a retired criminal living a dysfunctional suburban life he doesn't know how to appreciate. Trevor is difficult to describe without using words that would get this article flagged, but he lives in the desert and operates on a different set of social rules than everyone else. Franklin is younger, smarter than his situation, and looking for a way to move up.
They're genuinely different from each other in how they talk, how they move through the world, and what they're trying to get out of it. Switching between them freely, sometimes cutting away from one mid-activity to find another already in a mess they've created, gives the city a feeling of being populated by people with their own momentum. It makes Los Santos feel bigger than it is.
The heist missions bring all three together and give you real decisions about how to approach them. You pick your crew, you choose your method, you deal with what happens when things don't go as planned. It was a level of player agency in story missions that GTA hadn't really offered before.
GTA Online
If you want to understand why GTA V is still everywhere more than a decade after it launched, the honest answer is GTA Online. It launched alongside the main game in 2013, was a disaster for the first several weeks due to server problems that made it basically unplayable, and then slowly grew into one of the most successful online games ever made.
Over more than a decade, Rockstar added heist missions, property businesses, motorcycle clubs, nightlife operations, submarine heists, a fully functional casino, and a stream of other content updates that consistently expanded what you could do and own inside the game. Each major update brought players back who had moved on. The world kept getting larger in a way that made returning feel worthwhile rather than pointless.
The in-game currency system, where real money can be spent on Shark Cards to speed up the grind, has generated revenues reportedly well in excess of $8 billion over the game's lifetime. Whether that model is a good one for players is a fair debate, but it funded years of free content that kept the game alive long past the point where it would otherwise have been forgotten.
Running on Three Generations
GTA V launched on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013. It was updated for PS4 and Xbox One in 2014, with improved visuals and a first-person camera option that made the whole game feel different. It was updated again for PS5 and Xbox Series X in 2022, this time with genuinely better graphics, a performance mode running at a smooth 60 frames per second, and proper DualSense support on PlayStation that makes the controller respond to in-game actions.
Each re-release reached a new group of players who hadn't played it before and gave existing players a reason to return. The 2022 version in particular felt meaningfully different on current hardware, not just a straightforward port with a new coat of paint.
The Question of Taste
It's worth acknowledging that GTA V isn't a game for everyone. The humour is frequently crude. The world it presents is satirical to the point of being unpleasant at times. The online environment can be genuinely hostile depending on the server you're in.
None of that has meaningfully hurt its reach. Rockstar built a world that rewards exploration and experimentation, put three different kinds of protagonist in it, and then kept adding things to do for over a decade. The audience responded accordingly.
What GTA VI Has to Inherit
GTA VI is confirmed and widely expected around late 2025 or 2026. The announcement trailer broke records when it dropped. The pressure on it is significant, partly because of how long people have been waiting and partly because of what GTA V established as the standard.
It's not just about making a good open-world game. GTA V proved that a single release can sustain a community for over a decade if the world is good enough and the developers keep adding to it. GTA VI doesn't only need to be worth playing. It needs to be worth living in for the next ten years. That's a very specific kind of pressure, and GTA V's run is the clearest possible demonstration of what success at that level actually looks like.
