To perform a comprehensive analysis comparing the prognostic and discriminative ability of the eighth AJCC gastric cancer (GC) pathological classification to that of the seventh, sixth and fifth editions, and secondly to assess their long-term significance. Patients who had undergone R0 gastrectomy were identified and restaged accordingly. To evaluate and confirm any difference in prognostic ability between the competing editions, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) were computed and compared since both have different analytic strengths. The area under the curve (AUC) with 95% CI based on the time-dependent receiver-operating characteristics analyses were also calculated to assess any change in prognostic rankings from the first to tenth postoperative year. The rankings calculated by both statistical methods showed similar results, in which the seventh edition was identified as possessing the best prognostic ability. Additionally, these ranks were found to remain consistent over the ten postoperative years, but demonstrated no clinical significance as their respective 95% CIs calculated by the AIC, BIC, and AUC were found to overlap. However, the more detailed staging classifications of the eighth edition was shown to display the best prognostic demarcation for stratifying patients with higher-staged disease. This study thereby identified the eighth AJCC GC edition to possess similar long-term prognostic ability as to its previous three editions but contrastingly demonstrated the best distinctive ability for stratifying overall survival and can thus be considered as being clinically more reliable.