GTA V has been a phenomenon since it launched on the Xbox 360 and PS3 at the tail end of the last generation of consoles, selling faster than any game ever released and making boatloads of money for Rockstar and its publisher. However it continues to impress even today, over a year and a half since it debuted, by becoming one of the most popular games ever played through Steam.
Today it managed to achieve a whopping 301,246 players online concurrently. That puts it not too far behind standouts like Counter Strike: Global Offensive and DotA 2, and easily pushes it past long time favourites like Team Fortress 2, Football Manager 2015 and Skyrim.
Speaking of that latter RPG too, it held the title for biggest non-steam game in terms of concurrent players since its release, at around 280,000. GTA V has now eclipsed that, though Skyrim is still ticking along at almost 30,000 concurrent players, despite being a four year old game.
GTA V isn't quite that old, but it is old and has been released three times, so when you consider that several hundred thousand more copies of the game have been sold on PC, it shows what a phenomenal success it has been. That's probably been quite a load off of Rockstar's mind too, since it was one of the most expensive games ever made too.
GTA V purportedly cost $137 million to make, and a further $128 million to market. However it made over a billion dollars in its first few days of doing on sale in 2013, so Rockstar did fine out of the deal.
