Why do people think gta6 is going to sell a billion copies?

[JackHandy]

PotentHerbs said:

JackHandy said:

You interpreted it perfectly! Well done! lol

Digital storefronts, BC, and remasters mean games never go away. They span two, sometimes three or more generations, whereas older games were usually confined to a five-year run. This entirely shifts the goals posts, and it has made sales records more confusing (fudged). At least imo.

And that's not even getting into concurrent players, or how many times a game has been played. If you try to parse that in... yeesh.  

Older games also get released/remastered on digital storefronts and they would benefit with BC too. 

Although I don't see how this would fudge sales numbers to a significant degree. Just because older games re - release for multiple generations doesn't mean they will sell anywhere close to the original. GTA V is the obvious outlier. Remakes like TLOU Part I and Ocarina of Time are other obvious outliers. But sales charts wouldn't count them as the same SKU anyways. People counting all the versions of say FF7 (PS1, PSN rerelease, PS4 remaster, etc) as one version is an entirely different story, and usually only done for enthusiast forums like this. 

I'll give you an example.

According to the internet, SMB3 sold around 17 million copies on NES, and Minecraft has sold around 425 million copies. Now, looking at those numbers, if you weren't around when SMB3 came out, which is plausible, given its age, you might laugh if someone said that SMB3 was just as big, if not bigger than Minecraft was back in the day. But it was. It totally was. And so was GTA on PS2 (any one of them), MGS 2, Halo 3, Wii Sports... so many titles. But if you look at their numbers, it's like... yeah... right. Because the record books have all been muddied up due to changes in the industry.