GTA 6

Rockstar

In an age when the biggest movies, TV shows and video games on Earth top out at eye-watering $300-500 million budgets, the idea of Grand Theft Auto 6 costing at least a billion dollars to make seems insane on the surface. It isn’t.

The time and resources that have gone into making what will be the highest-profile entertainment launch ever, possibly even the biggest consumer project launch ever, should easily hit that when we’re talking about games like Bungie’s Marathon costing $250 million or Spider-Man 2 costing $315 million. Now, fresh reports from Business Insider have reiterated that estimate, now somewhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, without Rockstar commenting publicly. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, however, just told Bloomberg that Rockstar has been given “unlimited financial, creative, and human resources, and then they aim to deliver perfection."

This may all seem like a lot of pressure, and it is, and that budget is too big to fail. But it…it is. GTA 6 is literally too big to fail. At least it will be at launch, barring any sort of disaster. Even then, it may not even matter. All we have to do is look to the past to understand the plain facts here.

• In 2013, Grand Theft Auto 5 earned $815.7 million in its first 24 hours. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $1.16 billion today.
• That equated to 11.21 million copies sold on day one. In 2013, the $60 price point was for mainstream video games, barring special editions.
• Over its lifespan, GTA 5 has sold 225 million units across three console generations and PC, and earned roughly $10.38 billion over its lifespan, half that coming from GTA Online microtransactions.

You can see the case being made here. I don’t think there is anyone who expects GTA 6 to do worse than GTA 5 at launch, and between pre-orders, standard and deluxe day one purchases, it’s doing over that inflation-adjusted $1.16 billion, almost without question. It took eight more months for GTA 5 to hit $2 billion, but that’s eight months out of what has now been a 13-year cycle, ending with that over $10 billion number. That, however, was at a budget reported to be at a quarter or a third of that GTA 6 billion.

I don’t think it’s a question that GTA 6 makes up its colossal production budget instantly, but rather, this is the corporate world. Your game can’t just be profitable; it can’t just sell well; it has to hit expectations of how well it sells, and missing that mark can lead to very poor results indeed for the company in question. In other words, GTA 6 can’t just be a monster; it has to be Godzilla.

I have seen nothing to indicate that day one hype won't lead to beyond-record-shattering sales, probably easily sailing past GTA 5. But even when we’re talking about “disaster mode,” if something goes horribly wrong, we can look at say, Cyberpunk 2077, a game that launched with loads of missing features and technical problems, but by that point had sold 8 million copies and within 10 days, sold 13 million. And there has probably been no worse high-profile launch in video game history (you’ll recall at one point, PlayStation actually delisted it from its store).

Don’t bet against GTA 6. Even if expectations are high, they are probably not high enough.

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