Rockstar Denies GTA 6 Cost $1.5 Billion. It Just Won't Say What It Actually Cost.

Rockstar wants you to know one specific number is wrong. It just isn't interested in replacing it with a different one.

In a detailed Bloomberg report on the making of Grand Theft Auto 6, Rockstar's head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, pushed back on a rumor that the game's development budget had topped $1.5 billion, more than it reportedly cost to build the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The rumor appears to trace back to a July 2025 Gulf News article, which claimed the skyscraper cost $1.5 billion to construct while GTA 6's budget was "thought to" sit closer to $2 billion. Kolbe says that's not accurate. What she didn't do is offer an actual figure.

That's consistent with how Take-Two has handled questions about the game's cost all year. Business Insider reported earlier this year that industry analysts estimated the budget at somewhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, based partly on comments from Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. Zelnick wouldn't put a number on it either, but he did concede, in his words, that "it was expensive."

So the headline figure gets knocked down, but the broader point stands: even shy of $1.5 billion, GTA 6 is almost certainly the most expensive video game ever made, by a wide margin.

How the competition stacks up

Nothing else in the industry comes close, at least not among games with a traditional development budget. Space sim Star Citizen has reportedly crossed $1 billion in spending, but that money has come in gradually over more than a decade, funded by ongoing sales of virtual spaceships rather than a single studio's production budget. Bungie's recently released extraction shooter reportedly cost more than $250 million. Concord, the ill-fated shooter Sony shut down shortly after launch, had an initial development deal worth around $200 million, according to Kotaku.

Even the industry's most prestigious single-player games don't get near GTA 6's territory. Documents accidentally made public during the 2023 Xbox-Activision FTC case revealed that both The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West cost more than $200 million each to develop. And last year, court filings finally gave the public a real number for Call of Duty: a 2024 document confirmed Activision spent $700 million on Black Ops Cold War, though that figure covers the game's full life cycle, not just its initial production.

Against that backdrop, GTA 6's budget, whatever it ultimately is, sits in a category of its own.

A studio that's doubled in size

Part of the explanation is simply how much bigger Rockstar has become. Bloomberg's report confirms the studio now employs 4,711 people across 12 offices, up from 2,441 when Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018. That's a doubling of headcount in eight years, and payroll on that scale doesn't come cheap, especially for a project that's spent the better part of a decade in development.

But the financial case for spending that much money gets a lot easier to understand once you look at what Rockstar is projecting to make back. Bloomberg notes some forecasts point to 40 million units sold and roughly $3 billion in revenue within the first four months after launch. GTA 6 arrives in November priced at $80 for the standard edition, a $10 bump over the usual $70 ceiling for big-budget games, with an Ultimate Edition running $100. Online multiplayer, widely expected sometime next year, possibly alongside a PC release rumored for early 2027, gives Rockstar another long runway of revenue after the initial launch window.

The preorder numbers already look historic

The early signals back up the optimism. Analytics firm Newzoo estimated GTA 6 generated around $180 million in digital preorders across the United States and the five biggest European markets in the final week of June, right after preorders opened at midnight on June 25. Using GTA 5's historical player distribution, where roughly 69% of its lifetime console players came from those same six markets, Newzoo extrapolated a global first-week preorder figure of approximately $260 million. Based on how preorder spending typically tracks toward total launch-week sales, the firm projected GTA 6 could pull in anywhere from $3.25 billion to $5.2 billion in cumulative sales by the end of its first week on sale.

For context, GTA 5 made $1 billion in just three days when it launched in 2013, a pace that made it the fastest-selling entertainment product in history at the time, narrowly edging out Avengers: Endgame's five days to the same mark at the global box office. GTA 6 looks positioned to clear that $1 billion milestone even faster than its predecessor did.

GTA 5 went on to sell roughly 230 million units, making it the second best-selling video game ever, trailing only Minecraft's 400 million. Whether GTA 6 can eventually catch Minecraft is an open question, but it's not an absurd one anymore.

Rockstar's enormous spending starts to look less like a gamble and more like a calculated bet once the sales projections are lined up next to it. Bloomberg's report also includes one more detail worth filing away: Rockstar has told staff its next game won't take another eight years to make. What that next project actually is remains unknown, but after a development cycle this long and this costly, it's clear the studio doesn't want to repeat it.