GTA 6’s budget has become unimaginable – one reason is the work of thousands of people

Between a billion and two is a long way, so the estimate is quite rough. But no expert seems to be betting the game will cost less than a billion, so it could very well be the most expensive video game ever made.

The predecessor, GTA 5 released in 2013, cost an estimated $137 million.

The game’s production costs alone have been estimated at a billion dollars. Add to that the marketing costs: these days, for the most expensive games, they are easily hundreds of millions of dollars or more.

For example, the board game Monopoly has been used startlingly to market the mobile phone version over a billion dollars.

How publishing a video game can cost another billion?

“The simple answer is that the scale of the game is so huge,” says the professor Olli Sotamaa From the Game Cultures Research Unit of the University of Tampere.

The development of the game began in full force in 2020. Sotamaa estimates that the biggest expense item is the salary expenses of the thousand-strong team of game developers over the years.

“There are a huge number of Hollywood actors, some very famous ones, that need to be instilled in the game. It’s not just the people who color the pixels and make the code.”

Grand Theft Auto -game series’ selling point since the 1990s has been its open, large game world. The games model large American cities and their environments, such as Los Angeles (GTA 5) and Miami (GTA Vice City). The player can immerse himself in the world and adventure through a wide area by car, plane or boat.

“It’s a huge area that needs to be planned… if not every single tree separately, but at least the buildings,” says Sotamaa.

On evaluatedthat GTA 6’s playing field would be twice the size of its predecessor.

The game engine imitates real life traffic system, weather conditions, city architecture. The spectrum of external experts is also wide for this reason: for example, the view of architects is needed.

Today according to Sotama, it is the norm that big video games also give the player the opportunity to play online. The fact that you can play the game with others online must have extended the life cycle of GTA V, which was released in 2013. The servers that enable Pelivanhus group play are still running.

“Certainly one part of why the production costs of 6 are so impossibly large is that they are already preparing to maintain the multiplayer infrastructure,” Sotamaa surmises.

GTA 6:lla there are performance pressures. When game developer Rockstar released its predecessor, GTA 5, it broke seven Guinness World Records. For example, it generated more money in one day than any entertainment industry product up to that point.

“Everyone expects it to be better than the previous ones, not just the previous GTAs but the previous Rockstar games like Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar is such a big and important brand that they can’t afford to mess up,” says Sotamaa.

According to analysts, Rockstar has nothing to worry about, even if GTA 6 costs another billion. Under evaluationthat the game would collect five billion dollars or 4.3 billion euros in Rockstar’s coffers within a week of its release.

Others too The games of the 2020s have reached the billion mark or have already crossed the mark. For example, the Chinese one published in 2020 Genshin Impact -the further development and maintenance of the role-playing game costs up to 200 million dollars, i.e. 170 million euros, annually. So the total price tag of the game is evaluated approximately one billion dollars, or 860 million euros.

Also unpublished so far Star Citizen -game is historically expensive. It has collected already billion dollars funding.

However, Sotamaa emphasizes that billion-dollar games like GTA 6 are, for the time being, rather exceptional cases than the new norm. Few games are made for such a long time and with such high expectations.

“To move to the point where the games are regularly in the billion category – it won’t happen right away. There will still be hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions and even tens of millions of games.”

Sotamaa points out that the budget does not reveal everything about the game’s value or success.

“There can be games that cost less than one-hundredth of GTA to produce, and yet they can be incredibly engaging and wonderfully functional games that employ tens, if not hundreds, of people.”

According to him, the so-called AAA category of games, i.e. games with a high budget and wide distribution, to which GTA belongs, has also been successfully attempted in Finland.

“Finnish companies make good results with a really small team and moderate budgets.”

At their most expensive, Finnish video games have cost around 50–70 million euros. According to estimates, they have reached this at least Alan Wake 2 and saros. The games probably are most expensive ever Finnish entertainment industry products.