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Developer Rockstar Games has announced that Grand Theft Auto Online, the multiplayer component of Grand Theft Auto, has had its "biggest year" ever in 2017.
They don’t quantify exactly what metric has declared 2017 as GTA Online’s biggest ever year in this blog post, but have said that in December 2017 more people played GTA Online than ever before, quite an impressive stat considering the game launched in October 2013, several years ago.
Of course, the game is now available on PC, Xbox One and PS4 in addition to its original launch platforms of the PS3 and Xbox 360, but the spike in players is probably due to Rockstar’s new Doomsday Heist expansion for GTA Online.
They go over some details in a blog post on the subject, but this is a remarkably long tail for an online game, and a sterling endorsement of the games as a service model, with Rockstar releasing new content on a near weekly basis.
There’s a good reason to support it for the developers and publisher Take-Two as, with nearly 85m copies being sold across all platforms, there is a huge potential playerbase.
In the spring, Rockstar’s newest game Red Dead Redemption 2 is planned for release and the expectation is that this will launch with some sort of Red Dead Online, although currently the only known fact is that the game will come with a "brand-new online multiplayer experience."
