The wildest video game budgets can't hold a candle to GTA 6

When you think about the most expensive entertainment productions ever created, video games are likely not the first thing that comes to mind. Hollywood studios routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a single movie that can have a multi-year production schedule. But video games have actually become just as expensive to produce of late, sometimes even surpassing major films. Case in point: Grand Theft Auto VI looks set to become the most expensive game ever created.

While Rockstar Games hasn't publicly disclosed how much it has spent so far, analysts peg the estimated budget at well over $1 billion, with some putting the current figure at around $1.5 billion. That puts GTA VI in rarefied territory, as it outpaces the known budgets of both major theatrical releases and other AAA games. So what has caused video game development to become so expensive and why is GTA VI's budget in particular eclipsing other big names?

A billion-dollar video game budget may seem surprising at first glance, but it starts to make sense once you consider that a modern game often has just as many moving pieces as a Hollywood production. You need actors, writers, programmers, animators, designers and composers among others to make an expansive open-world game. And short of a few outliers like the Avatar series, movies are typically in active production for a couple of years. GTA VI has been in active development for closer to a decade. Once a game is nearing completion, it usually goes through a rigorous testing process that requires yet another team.

Apart from a handful of indie breakthroughs, it's common for game budgets to quickly spiral into the double or triple-digit millions these days. Game development can also take several years, with hundreds of employees dedicated to a single project.

Development costs and timelines have been steadily rising, though. In 2023, court documents revealed that Sony Interactive Entertainment had spent $212 million on Horizon Forbidden West and $220 million on The Last of Us: Part II.

More recently, another court filing revealed that Activision's development costs for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War topped $700 million over the course of the game's life cycle. Modern live service games require constant development resources for additional maps, game modes, and new content in general. The initial budget for the base game was almost certainly lower than $700 million.

GTA VI is poised to break that threshold, based on even conservative estimates. And that's before you even consider its online mode, which, barring a huge surprise, will not debut alongside the single-player experience in November 2026.

So will it all pay off? Even though it's been over a decade since GTA V's Online mode released, leaked revenue data suggests Rockstar still earns millions of dollars in weekly revenue from microtransactions and GTA+ memberships.

With that much money on the table, it's perhaps not surprising that Rockstar and publisher Take-Two Interactive are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions on GTA VI. The single-player experience is expected to eventually sell hundreds of millions of copies and the online mode could have a loyal fanbase for the next decade and beyond. In 2013, GTA V generated $800 million in sales within a single day of its launch, with its total revenue now standing somewhere around the $10 billion mark.

There's one other billion-dollar game that often comes up in these discussions: Star Citizen. In development since 2011, its developer has raked in more than a billion dollars through crowdfunding and sales of in-game ships. Despite this impressive figure, though, Star Citizen has never reached a stage where it could be considered a finished game, even if it's technically playable. Its more-focused single-player game Squadron 42 was originally targeted for 2014 and is currently scheduled for 2027.

Rockstar Games has not escaped challenges either. It was forced to push back GTA VI's release date multiple times. Originally set to arrive in 2025, it was pushed back to May 2026 and then again to November 2026.

Feature creep in modern games has made development difficult, to the point where even skyrocketing budgets cannot save the day. Rockstar North co-head Aaron Garbut told The New York Times that GTA VI will ship with 600,000 animations, roughly double that of the studio's previous game, Red Dead Redemption 2. GTA V had just 55,000 animations, and was still widely praised for being one of the most detail-heavy games of the 2010s.

Implementing these complex details takes time and manpower, though, and this has had a direct impact on working conditions at major game studios. Around the time of The Last of Us: Part II's release, reports emerged that Naughty Dog employees had worked mandatory overtime and long hours, dubbed crunch. Simultaneously, many criticized the intricate animations for being extraneous given the human cost involved.

Rockstar Games' previous major game, Red Dead Redemption 2, also saw employees working 100-hour work weeks. GTA VI's development has seen controversies of its own, with employee allegations of intense crunch and late-night working hours. Rockstar also allegedly fired several employees involved in unionizing efforts, a claim the company denies.