DEC. 10, 2010 • After selling in 5.52 million units for the launch of Gran Turismo 5 worldwide, Sony Computer Entertainment announced that the franchise had exceeded sales of 60 million units since the original game was released in December 1997. Gran Turismo 5 is the ninth installment in the series.
Impact: Gran Turismo 5 was not on every analysts’ radar to be a huge hit until recently thanks to years of development delays, and a release date for GT5 that was in question even as late as E3 2010. Further, it is a single platform game, and that can diminish sales despite the popularity of the racing genre in some regions like Europe. Then there was the possibility that many PlayStation consumers had written off GT5 altogether after GT5:Prologue. On the other hand, there haven’t been many successful racing games on the PS3, even first-tparty titles. More likely there was large pent up demand for a big time racing game on Sony’s platform and GT5 was able to capitalize across all major PS3 territories.
