The video game industry has an annual turnover of almost 50,000 million euros worldwide, which makes this sector one of the most thriving in the economy. In fact, as happens in the cinema, in this world there are great blockbusters that, sometimes, exceed the budget of the most expensive titles made for the big screen. Thus, at the end of 2011, the BioWare company presented Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) , a massively multiplayer online game set in the universe of Star Wars . Its development involved an investment of about 145 million euros , little less than the movie Titanic . However, in the end it only sold 2.58 million copies and, unlike that one, it was a commercial failure. A similar fate ran Too Human , a futuristic action role-playing game for the Xbox 360 console that, after a decade of tug of war, was presented in 2008. The nearly 40 million euros that were dedicated to its development did not they managed to sell more than 750,000 units.
On the contrary, those in charge of Rockstar Games managed to turn an already interesting and novel series, Grand Theft Auto (GTA) , into one of the largest consumer products in history. In 2008, GTA IV was the first game to appear prominently on the front page of numerous national newspapers on the same day it was released. The violent adventures of Niko Bellic , its protagonist, achieved great media coverage, and in just one week the title had a turnover of 360 million euros . Since then, some 25 million copies of it have been sold.
This year, Rockstar has released the next installment, GTA V , in which it has spared no expense. His new game, which takes place in a huge open world, the fictional city of Los Santos, has cost almost triple than its predecessor (190 million euros compared to just over 65 million) , but has raised a whopping 725 million of euros in the first three days put on sale. Currently, it is the most expensive video game ever produced.
