GTA 6 may well be the most expensive video game ever made, with parent company Take-Two estimated to have spent $1 billion to $1.5 billion so far.
Business Insider suggested the eye-watering budget based on industry analyst estimations as part of an interview with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. Zelnick wouldn’t say how much the company had spent on GTA 6 so far, but did admit “it was expensive.” If we’re talking about billions of dollars here, that’s one hell of an understatement.
To put GTA 6 into context, most of the triple-A video game budgets that make headlines do so for being in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Bungie’s recently released extraction shooter reportedly had a budget of over $250 million, for example. Concord’s initial development deal was around $200 million, according to a report by Kotaku. In 2023, new documents submitted as part of the Xbox Federal Trade Commission case accidentally revealed The Last of Us: Part II and Horizon Forbidden West each cost more than $200 million to develop. Last year, the astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone, although that was over the shooter’s life cycle. GTA 6, clearly, surpasses them all.
Given the expectation that GTA 6 will be the biggest entertainment launch of all time, it comes as no surprise to hear of astronomical development costs for Rockstar’s game. And it has been in the works for some time; according to Business Insider, some of the thousands of staff at Rockstar have been working on GTA 6 for over a decade now. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Zelnick said development costs have risen over the years, but Take-Two tries to give its teams “unlimited financial, creative human resources and then they aim to deliver perfection.”
Any conversation about GTA 6 development costs naturally leads to a discussion about how much Rockstar will charge for the game. Bank of America recently came out with a recommendation that GTA 6 be sold for $80, $10 more than the norm. Analyst opinions on the GTA 6 price are all over the place, with some saying Rockstar should stick with $70, and others saying it could easily justify going up to $100. While GTA 6 will undoubtedly set sales records, there are questions about how well it can do amid one of the toughest economies in recent memory. As Business Insider points out, console video gaming is more expensive than ever, with Sony raising the price of its PlayStation 5 hardware in March. GTA 6 launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S only, something Zelnick recently explained.
As reported by IGN, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told an audience at iicon recently that “consumers pay for the value that you bring to them, and our job is to charge way way way less of the value delivery. How you feel about something you buy is the intersection of the thing itself and what you pay for. Consumers need to feel like the thing itself is amazing and the price they were charged was fair for what they got.”
Zelnick went on to mention that game pricing has actually gotten cheaper over the years, a reference to the fact that major game releases have been priced at $60 or at most $70 for more than a decade, as compared to greater rates of inflation seen in the wider economy.
“If you look at it through that lens, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But that isn’t the lens through which we look. Instead, we look at… how do we deliver something amazing, and how do we make sure that what people pay for it feels very reasonable.”
We’ll just have to wait until Rockstar kicks off GTA 6 marketing (hopefully with Trailer 3) this summer to find out just how much the game will cost. After a series of delays, GTA 6 is set to launch on November 19, 2026.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
