Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide

Civilization series tops 31M games sold

That’s a lot of exploring and civilization building.

Take-Two Interactive Software said today that it has sold more than 31 million games to date in the Civilization series. This means that the company has sold more than 10 million copies of the series in the past year, as it previously said in April 2014 that it has sold more than 21 million units.

Strauss Zelnick, the chairman and chief executive of New York-based Take-Two, said in a conference call with analysts about its quarterly financials that the company is proud it has diversified beyond the Grand Theft Auto series. Grand Theft Auto V alone has sold more than 54 million games to date. That title launched on the PC on April 14, and new revenue keeps coming in from Grand Theft Auto Online, which features in-game purchases. Average monthly users to date in 2015 is up 40 percent in the online version compared to 2014.

Zelnick said in the previous quarter that Take-Two now has 10 titles over 5 million copies sold and 40 titles with over 1 million copies sold.

“Our company is now structurally a higher margin enterprise than at any other time in its history,” Zelnick said.

He also said the company has sold more than 7 million copies to date of NBA 2K15. WWE Super Card has been downloaded more than 7.5 million times.

NBA 2K Online, a free-to-play online game, has 27 million registered users to date in China.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.