GTA Online has more cash, free gear, and cheap apartments this weekend

Rockstar will celebrate GTA Online's nouveau riche this weekend in the best way it knows how: giving them even more dirty money. The Ill-Gotten Gains Event Weekend (Part One) will run from Friday through Sunday, juicing bank accounts and player progression in celebration of the new update that just went live.

First off, the new Adversary modes introduced alongside the Heist update will award twice as much GTA$ over the weekend - it's the ideal time to try to escape a team of murderous big rigs while riding a bicycle. If you participate in a full event playlist, you'll also receive a free set of sticky bombs, molotovs, proximity mines, and body armor, win or lose. All races are worth double reputation points, too.

If you're already high level and flush with cash, you may as well spend the weekend expanding your real-estate portfolio: all high-end apartments and garages will be on sale for 25 percent off. Some super-ritzy apartments normally go for as much as GTA$500,000, meaning the potential savings would be more than enough to put bounties on everybody who runs you over for the next few days.

Also be sure to pick an apartment (or two) with a nice view of the racetrack, yacht club and Rockford Hills regions so you can watch the have-lessers fight over event crate drops. And by that I mean get in your attack helicopter, finish off the survivors, and grab the crates yourself, because they'll have exclusive in-game brand knock-off T-shirts. GTA 5 is parodying its own satirical high-end brands with satirical knock-offs, and you definitely need an ouroboros like that in your wardrobe.

Rockstar plans to release the second half of the Ill-Gotten Gains update later this summer, so you should expect another cash-boosting murder-weekend around then, too.

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Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.