Some GTA 6 hopefuls are killing time waiting for the game's November 2026 release date by snooping through Rockstar Games' financial records and trying to work out how much the open-world blockbuster costs to make.
There's been lots of speculation around GTA 6's mysterious budget, what with how long it's taken Rockstar Games to come out with a sequel to its biggest money maker and how damn expensive every frame of its latest trailers looks. But leave it to Rockstar Games fans to go sleuthing through the company's official documents while waiting for the slightest slither of news about GTA 6.
YouTuber Saukko505 recently decided to investigate the nebulous GTA 6 budget in a new video by mixing some amount of guesswork with the developer's publicly available financial documents on the UK Government website, which breaks down how much the studio has spent on staff salaries and more between 2019 and now - seemingly for every Rockstar studio, not just the ones based in the UK.
The content creator eventually concluded that GTA 6's budget is somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion on the high end, though he states that he's by no means an accountant and that his maths shouldn't be taken as gospel. It should also be noted that a company's expenditure doesn't necessarily align with a game's budget, since there's likely a decent chunk of Rockstar developers who were working on GTA Online, Red Dead Online, Red Dead Redemption's next-gen version, and more during that time. Not to mention that every company has costs unrelated to the products they built.
We're unlikely to ever really know how much GTA 6 cost to produce, so take all speculation with a grain of salt; however, should the guesses made by Saukko505 and others turn out to be true, then the crime epic is probably the most expensive entertainment product ever made, far exceeding the reported budgets of mammoth movie and game releases.
