....and PC gamers wonder why consoles are the platform of choice for publishers? There is your reason right there.

With the indie explosion I'm not sure if that's true. I like to think we have less AAA options, but overall it seems the same, if not better (more options).

Pretty massive but could you provide a source?

Wait if they shipped 45 million with ~10 been next gen,isn't GTA 5 PS3/360 kind of overtracked here?

WHAAAT!? That's insane! And it is a stand alone game! And they said gaming is dead.

Well deserved, any game with such a large scope of things to do and having fun and then throw in the online which is pretty well put together, and of course adding in that violence sells, this game had to sell well. I still play it for about 2-3 hours a day on weekdays and way more when I'm free.

you cant set this game as a standard. its not your usual game. GTA is a beast like no other. we are talking about 45 million here. Watch Dogs sold 8 million and was considered a smash hit. this makes that 8 million look like nothing. publishers wont look at GTA sales and say make their decisions based on it, no game is GTA, no franchise is GTA and nothing will ever be. heck, this game sold more than CoD ghost and advanced warfare combined 

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/gta-5-ships-45-million-copies-including-10-million/1100-6425079/

its legit. i know, really hard to believe. but hey, these kinds of sales is what you get when you make a game were you play as a guy taking a shit behind a trash can then go torture somebody. 

Imo indie games are still very restricted in genres and budget, they're not like full fledged game in most cases. Mainstream titles are now restricted to a few AAA productions per year: most of them are action games or shooters blended with a mix of rpg / survival /staealth /dirving elements. GTA is a good example fo this. These games sell so much because they offer a bit of all flavours and specific genre games are mostly dead. Plus since dev budget has got bigger, also marketing budget is.

Digital sales are fucking massive.  I'll make a thread detailing why in the next day or two.