Grand Theft Auto V sales skyrocket after Epic Games Store giveaway

By Chris Morris August 3, 2020

Grand Theft Auto V is showing no signs of slowing down.

Take-Two Interactive Software, in its second quarter earnings statement Monday, said its mid-May promotion with the Epic Games Store, where the game was given away for free, actually resulted in a huge sales surge in the month-and-a-half that followed.

GTA V sold-through more units from April athroughJune (the company’s first fiscal quarter) than in any first quarter since the title’s launch in 2013. And, in the six weeks following the promotion, the game sold more units than in the same period in any previous year.

That’s impressive for any game, much less for one that was released seven years ago. To date, GTA V has sold nearly 135 million copies, Take-Two said. And GTA Online has been a cash-printing machine for the company, with recurrent consumer spending on the game growing 155% last quarter, setting a new record.

Expect more growth to come, as GTA Online saw more new players join between April and June than it has since the game’s launch. And later this year, Rockstar will release what Take-Two official says- is GTA Online’s biggest update ever, featuring a new take on Heists in a new location.

GTA V and GTA Online are also expected to be major performers as the PlayStation 5 launches. A stand-alone version of GTA Online will be free to PS5 owners for the first three months of the system’s launch. Take-Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick, speaking with Digital Trends on Monday, would not discuss pricing for that stand-alone version after that period, nor would he discuss whether a version was forthcoming for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X.

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Chris Morris has covered consumer technology and the video game industry since 1996, offering analysis of news and trends and…

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Trevor firing an assault rifle in GTA 5.

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Gaming

A new Grand Theft Auto V mod features a cast of AI-voiced NPCs

The protagonists of GTA V pose for the camera.

A new PC mod for Grand Theft Auto V adds a new mission with over 30 NPCs whose responses and voices are generated by AI.
The mod is called Sentient Streets and was created by a modder that goes by Bloc. In it, players are a Los Santos Police Officer investigating a cult called the NihiAIists, who think they live in a game world and worship an AI god. During this investigation, players can speak to over 30 NPCs, but these conversations aren't scripted, and Bloc didn't hire professional voice actors to portray these characters. Instead, Sentient Streets uses AI to create both the NPCs' responses and their voices. To make this mod, Bloc used the Character Engine from Inworld and ElevenLabs, two tech companies heavily invested in AI.
AI Powered GTA V: Story Mode with AI NPCs (similar to ChatGPT)
This mod serves as the grand kickoff of Inworld and ElevenLabs' partnership, and they plan to make these Character Engine tools available to modders and game developers who want more reactive NPCs with AI-generated voices. Sentient Streets is an intriguing proof of concept, but its release also raises questions about how ethical the data sets from ElevenLabs that are being used to create these AI voices actually are. A press release from Inworld says that Character Engine voices can come from someone making "custom voices, cloning their own voices using a one-minute sample, or by synthesizing entirely new voices from scratch," and we got more clarification on this from a spokesperson for Inworld.
Digital Trends was told that the voices in Sentient Streets are some of the default options from the AI voice technology provided by ElevenLabs. As for the data ElevenLabs used to create those voices, it cites public domain data, data acquired in agreements with commercial partners, and vaguely defined publicly available data. That last part leaves a few question marks, as it's unclear what exactly constitutes as "publicly available."

The mod has launched in the middle of a building firestorm in the games industry. Several actors have voiced potential concerns about AI replacing their jobs or replicating their voices without consent. Assassin's Creed Syndicate actress Victoria Atkin told Axios that a mod that added her voice to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim without her knowledge was "very frightening" and made her "upset and confused." With the rise of tools like Inworld's Character Engine, situations similar to this could become more common without stricter guidelines about what machines can be trained on.
If you want to try Sentient Streets out for yourself and see how its AI voices are handled, it's available to download on Nexus Mods.