Grand Theft Auto V is one of the best-selling video games of all time, but has it managed to clear its own marketing & production budget? GTA V was met with critical and commercial success, but a city as expansive as Los Santos comes with a steep price tag, as Rockstar is known for pumping a lot of money into its games.

GTA V is a money-making machine, which is mostly due to the enduring success of GTA Online. There is a massive fanbase for the game that just keeps pouring money into it, to the point where fans are wondering if the rumored GTA VI is even a good idea, considering the cash cow that Rockstar already has access to. It could be argued that Rockstar would do better to just keep GTA Online going for as long as possible, waiting for enthusiasm to inevitably die down before revealing the next entry in the long-running series.

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The success of GTA V has been ongoing since the PS3/Xbox 360 era, with the game shipping 150 million units to date across multiple platforms. GTA V spent five years in development and was created by a global team of over 1000 people. The price tag for such a project must have been huge, to say nothing of the marketing money that was spent to advertise the game.

How Much Grand Theft Auto V Cost To Make

It was revealed in an interview with The Scotsman (as archived by the International Business Times) that GTA V‘s overall budget was a combined $265 million dollars. This made GTA V the most expensive video game ever made at the time, beating out the records held by Final Fantasy VII and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. There are other games that have cost more to develop since GTA V came out, including Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Citizen, but the current record holder is another Rockstar game: Red Dead Redemption 2, which cost $540 million (or thereabouts) to make.

The massive cost of GTA V was a gamble that paid off in the end. GTA V is the second best-selling video game of all time, behind Minecraft, and it continues to bring in money for Rockstar. That money is due to continue into the current generation of consoles, as GTA V is also coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X in November, with a separate GTA Online mode on the way. If Grand Theft Auto V keeps making money, then there’s a good chance it will be ported to the PS6 and the successor to the Xbox Series X/S in the future.

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Source: International Business Times

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Scott Baird
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Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz.
A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film student before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading comic books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, regardless of what any career advisor might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘90s when his first console was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a game from a tape cassette player to a black and white TV set. Scott now writes game reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, as well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.

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