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There are only three franchises bigger than Grand Theft Auto in the UK: FIFA, Call of Duty and Mario.
All three of those franchises feature dozens of entries stretching back decades. Whereas the GTA series boasts just seven mainline entries and a handful of spin-offs.
The franchise is comfortably bigger than LEGO, Star Wars and Pokémon, which sit in fifth, sixth and seventh place.
This is entirely based on revenue and only factors in physical game sales, with all data and statistics supplied by GfK.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is obviously the biggest of these titles. The game generated £94 million in revenue in just five days when it arrived back in September 2013, which was the same amount of revenue that GTA 4 managed in its lifetime. It has gone on to sell three times the number of copies of GTA 4 – and that's purely based on physical sales, it doesn't account for GTA 5's success as a digital download.
Based on boxed sales alone, GTA 5 is comfortably the UK's best-selling game of all time.
Despite initially launching as an Xbox 360 and PS3 game, GTA 5 has narrowly sold better as a PS4 and Xbox One title (PS4 and Xbox One arrived two months after GTA 5 launched, although the upgraded game wouldn't release for another year). However, the game generated more revenue on its original machines (again, boxed sales alone, doesn't include microtransactions or digital downloads).
But what about previous Grand Theft Auto games?
GTA first arrived on UK shelves in November 1997 on PC, and it wasn't a huge hit (at first), only managing No.35 in the charts. The PS1 version appeared two weeks later and did better, but the game still only managed No.7. The
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