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New rumors have surfaced recently that GTA 6’s development and future marketing cycle will cost Rockstar between $1-2 billion. That would easily make it the most expensive game ever, ahead of Destiny (2014 – $500M), Cyberpunk 2077 (2020 – $330M) and Modern Warfare 2 (2009 – $310M).
Even Grand Theft Auto 5, which came out in 2013, only cost Rockstar $250 million. But when the game came out, it grossed over $1 billion in just three days – so it’s safe to say that the exorbitant development fee was well-deservedly returned.
If the rumors are true, then GTA 6 will be the most expensive game ever made. It’s also the most highly anticipated game in history, and for over a decade players have been sticking with GTA 5, desperately waiting for concrete news about the development of the next game in the series.
For the first time, this amount was reported by a hacker who leaked an early build of the game to the network, but on May 9 of this year, Dexerto Gaming reported on its Twitter that the budget of Grand Theft Auto 6 was leaked. A few days earlier, on May 3, 2023, the famous gaming YouTuber INTER discussed this topic in one of his YouTube videos. According to the blogger, the initial development cost for the upcoming game was estimated to be around $250 million. But if you take into account marketing, promotion and other expenses, then the total amount will easily exceed a billion dollars. And during the trials of the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, it turned out that even now the budget of some AAA games exceeds $1 billion.
After a massive leak last year that leaked 100GB of data, Rockstar Games had no choice but to admit it was working on the next Grand Theft Auto game, but that was about it. There was no indication of where the game would take place, what timeline it would follow, how many main characters it would have, or what GTA 6’s multiplayer modes would look like.
However, a massive marketing campaign seems to be on the horizon. Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar Games, is reportedly planning to host the campaign in Miami, Florida, which is where GTA 6 is rumored to take place, only in the GTA universe it’s called “Vice City”.
At press time, Take-Two is worth about $21 billion, so the $1.5 billion spent developing GTA 6 over the course of ten years doesn’t seem unrealistic – especially when you consider how much this game will earn when it finally comes out. .