GTA Online Shatters Records During 2019 Holiday Season Six Years After Its Initial Launch

Now more than a half a decade following the release of Grand Theft Auto V, it is practically a no brainer that the 2013 entry for the open-world adventure have toppled dozens of records as the title has been ranked the top selling game of the decade, NPD reports. However, it looks that the seven year-old title still racks in a surprising amount of players well after we knew how popular the game already was.

It was this past holiday season that Rockstar Games witnessed a record breaking amount of active players returning to the lobbies of GTA Online. While Rockstar does disclose that there were a complete surplus of concurrent players on GTA Online following the launch of The Diamond Casino Update in the summer, it was this past December that those record were broken again as the heist for the Diamond Casino reinvigorated the game’s server capacity even more.

“Thanks to you all, Grand Theft Auto Online is entering its seventh year more popular than ever,” Rockstar proclaimed earlier this week. “The back-to-back release of these two colossal updates – the biggest GTA Online has ever seen – also made December 2019 our largest month ever in terms of player numbers.”

Even more, Rockstar went on to thank those who create GTA V/GTA Online content on YouTube as the company also reveals to have achieved the most amount of views of the respected title on the video streaming platform. Stating that from December 30 to January 5 was GTA V’s biggest seven-day viewer period. Adding on that the following week also surmounted the most player engagement on YouTube as well.

Moving on to the wild west with Red Dead Redemption 2, player activity also spiked tremendously around the same time as GTA Online shattered previously recorded records. Rockstar reports that this incident is a result from the continuous support to the online freeroam and following the release of the Moonshiners Update as well.

The team shares that rewards for this new achievement will be provided to those who play either game. GTA Online users can expect up to GTA$2,000,000 divided between tow separate play times: January 30 – February 5 & February 6 – February 13. While Red Dead Online players will receive the Gun Slinger’s Cache from playing between January 28 – February 3 and the Bounty Hunter’s Kit during February 4 – February 10.

Rockstar Games closes out the post by sharing that the developer is still planning to release a few more updates that is planned to arrive to GTA Online later in 2020. They also share that more roles and story missions are teased to be added later on in the year too.

Source: Rockstar Games