GTA 5 Is UK's Best-Selling Physical Game So Far This Year

Nearly four years after it first launched, Grand Theft Auto V is the UK's best-selling boxed game in 2017 so far. According to an Entertainment Retailers Association report, Rockstar's open-world title outsold every other game in the UK during the first half of 2017, selling 334,280 units in total up to the end of June.

GTA's closest competitor was Ghost Recon: Wildlands, which sold around 20,000 fewer units. Horizon Zero Dawn finished at No.3 in the video game chart, with FIFA 17 (No.4) and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (No.5) rounding off the top five.

The figures--which originate from sales monitor Chart-Track--come as part of a report into entertainment media sales in the UK. Despite being the best-selling video game, GTA V could only place 13th on the overall chart of game, music, and video sales. However, the figures for games do not include digital sales, unlike those for music and video. It's possible, therefore, that other games eclipsed GTA V if downloads were taken into account and that the games could be higher on the overall entertainment chart than their current positions.

GTA V continues to perform well every week in the UK, and has now been on the chart for 201 weeks altogether. This week, it placed at No.3, and it even topped one weekly chart last month. Over in the US meanwhile, GTA V was the third best-selling game of June 2017. Rockstar continues to support its hit title with updates to its multiplayer portion, GTA Online. This week's update introduced a new mode called Power Mad, which centers around teams of two to four players attempting to secure a Juggernaut suit.

GTA V and Rockstar have been in the news of late after the publisher's parent company, Take-Two, attempted to block distribution of a modding tool called OpenIV. Rockstar argued that "OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody." After fan uproar, Rockstar later released a statement saying that Take-Two "has agreed that it generally will not take legal action against third-party projects involving Rockstar's PC games that are single-player, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of third parties."