Never understimate the forbidden fruit
Rockstar’s crime-ridden magnum opus, Grand Theft Auto V, is back in the number one spot of the UK charts, some five years after its release. The open-world title shoved passed both Call of Duty: WWII and FIFA 18, both of which have held a monopoly on the top spot, to steal the glory.
Since I’ve been listing the weekly charts, a lot of you fine folk have been flabbergasted by GTAV’s ability to maintain consistent high placing this far into its life. While I could write an entire essay on reasons why, learned from years of standing behind shop counters, it is essentially the result of several factors.
Firstly, GTAV is a go-to entry purchase with almost every console sold. When people pick up “a PS4/Xbox and some games,” one of those games, more often that not, is GTAV. It is also consistently cheap, and usually included in sales and bundle deals. GTA games are also the single most consumer-damaged discs, requiring re-purchases, sometimes multiple times by the same customers.
GTAV is a very popular “itch-scratching” title, with many customers re-selling and re-buying the title in a perpetual cycle of repetition. Finally, the game’s controversy simply never, ever stops inquisitive kids from wanting to get their mitts on it, long after everyone else has long gotten over its dubious themes.
Again, this isn’t even scratching the surface on what has enabled Rockstar’s digital crime spree to run and run for the past five years, and likely into the near-future, but just the pattern I’ve personally witnessed for GTAV and its many predecessors.
Elsewhere, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has shot up from twelfth to fifth place, while fellow Nintendo releases Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey still cling on to Top Ten positions. Further down the charts, re-entries were made by Resident Evil 7, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and The Evil Within 2.
U.K. video game sales chart w/e: January 13 2018
(Chart reflects in-store sales only)
1. Grand Theft Auto V – Take 2
2. Call of Duty: WWII – Activision
3. FIFA 18 – Electronic Arts
4. Assassin’s Creed Origins – Ubisoft
5. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – Nintendo
6. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – Microsoft
7. Star Wars Battlefront II – Electronic Arts
8. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Nintendo
9. Forza Motorsport 7 – Microsoft
10. Super Mario Odyssey – Nintendo
U.K. video game charts [GFK Chart-Track]
