Grand Theft Auto IV sold six million copies globally in its first week on sale, bringing in about $500 million (£256 million), according to its creator, Take Two Interactive.

The first week sales - which beat the $300 million earned by Halo 3, Microsoft's big release for the Xbox 360 last year - built upon the 3.6 million units the game shipped on its first day.

Earlier in the week, Chart-Track estimated that 609,000 copies of the game were sold on the first day of release in the UK alone - eclipsing the 501,000 set by the previous instalment in the Grand Theft Auto series, San Andreas, in October 2004.

Analysts said the figures were "at the top end" of expectations, and had been made possible by the game's simultaneous release on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms. Previous versions of Grand Theft Auto have been released exclusively on the PS3 first.

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"It's certainly one of the top five games franchises of all time, and from the perspective of Microsoft [which sells the Xbox 360], it was a real coup to be able to sell it at the same time as [Sony's] PS3," Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst with Screen Digest, said.

He said that the game would single-handedly help Sony shift more units of the PS3, which was released more recently than the Xbox 360 and did not yet have as large an install base.

Grand Theft Auto IV's release follows the success of Wii Fit, a fitness-focused game for Nintendo Wii which sold 240,000 copies in the UK in its first two days - more than the 200,000 analysts were expecting.

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