GTA IV smashes day one sales record

Data obtained by MCV from official UK industry monitor ChartTrack shows that Rockstar’s GTA IV has become the fastest selling game ever in a 24 hour period.

The figures – based on EPoS sales data and estimated retail transactions – show that total online and High Street sales for the game hit 609,000 in one day.

That beats the previous record of 501,000 set by another Rockstar title, GTA: San Andreas, on Friday, 29th October, 2004.

Xbox 360 narrowly nudged out PS3 in the ‘battle of the consoles’.

335,000 copies were sold on Microsoft’s machine – 55 per cent of all formats sales. The figure is a new record for the console, beating Halo 3’s first-day sales of 266,000 units on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007.

GTA IV sold 274,000 copies on PS3 yesterday – 45 per cent of all sales and another format record breaking performance.

PS3’s previous biggest day-one seller was Sony’s Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, which released on Friday, March 28th with 80,000 sales.

We’ll get into the whole week one debate next Tuesday, but it’s been a very good 24 hours for both Sony and Microsoft,” ChartTrack director Dorian Bloch told MCV.

It’s looking very, very promising for Rockstar in terms of full week sales. Even if If they don’t even sell one more unit, the current figure would still make for an astounding week one performance

"Barring a catastrophe, with lorries bringing stock into stores going AWOL, we can only see that sales number going up and up.

The Bank Holiday weekend should be a particularly fruitful period – but it will be interesting to see how long the stock lasts as people rush to stores.”