GTA Online officially got its first new Heist mission in six long years today, with the Kortz Center Heist inviting teams of four (you can solo it too, but what fun is that?) to stake out a prestigious art museum and make it a little less prestigious, if you catch my drift. The mission sounds like a fun and lucrative time, but if you're planning on hosting your friends and don't have a ton of in-game cash saved up, you should know there are some rather spendy prerequisites for doing so, and there isn't enough stolen virtual art in the world to recoup your real-world investment.
We did the math to figure out the barrier of entry to GTA Online's new heist and found it to be exorbitantly expensive if you're starting out fresh and want to buy your way in using Shark Cards, assuming you aren't working with any existing GTA+ bonuses or discounts. The reason for that is you first need a mansion to even begin thinking about hosting the Kortz Center Heist. The cheapest one is The Tonga Estate at $11.5 million in GTA money. You also need to own an art studio, which will set you back another $4.7 million, making the total minimum required to host the mission $16.2 million.
Again, assuming you're starting completely fresh, that means you'll need to buy a $10,000,000 cash card for $99.99 in real money, a $4,250,000 card for $49.99, a $1,500,000 card for $19.99, and a $600,000 card for $9.99, which equals $179.96 in actual money from your real-life bank account. With the GTA 6 price being set at $80 for the base game, that means you could pre-order Rockstar's upcoming behemoth twice and still have money leftover for a latte before you start bumping up against the price to run GTA Online's new Heist.
Of course, the huge caveat here is that you can join a friend's Heist for free if they already have a mansion and art museum, which is most certainly what the vast majority of GTA Online players are going to do. Still, it's harrowing to consider what a brand new player with no rich friends would have to shell out for the game's newest mission, especially when that same amount of money could be used to secure what's sure to be a much grander mission in just a few months twice over.
