According to industry analysts, Rockstar Games invested close to $265 million to make and market Grand Theft Auto 5. This made it the most expensive video game ever made, at the time. However, since Rockstar never released official numbers, Activision Blizzard held on to the record with Modern Warfare 2's $250 million total cost for years until Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Citizen supplanted the 2009 title.
If we believe the recent rumors, Rockstar's next GTA game will beat even Star Citizen, several times over.
The info comes from the hacker behind the shocking GTA 6 leak from a last week. After revealing developmental footage of the next GTA game, the 17-year-old hacker was arrested thanks to the combined efforts of the UK police and the FBI.
Despite so, more and more GTA 6 intel tidbits is finding its way online. For example, the hacker reportedly shared that Rockstar has been working on GTA 6 since 2014, which corroborates earlier rumors. In addition to this, the hacker claimed that the budget for GTA 6 is $2 billion.
It's not entirely clear if this astronomical figure is the actual total budget for GTA 6 or if it's the total running cost. The latter would be absurd, but it's also not impossible. After all, it's believed that Rockstar restructured the company mid-development.
Regardless of what's true, $2 billion is a stratospheric amount that would've been a shock if it wasn't GTA we're talking about.
Keep in mind, GTA 5 cleared more than $1 billion sales in its first three days of launch. Since Take-Two believes that GTA 6 will set creative benchmarks, we wouldn't put it past the company to put its money where its mouth is and spend as much as it can to make sure that happens. If genuine, we don't think that Rockstar would have a hard time making back its initial cost within the game's first year of launch.
