How much did GTA 6 cost to make?

Rockstar and Take-Two have never disclosed a budget, and publishers of this size essentially never do. Every dollar figure you have seen — one billion, two billion, three billion — is somebody’s estimate, not a disclosure.

The one set of real numbers

There is exactly one thread of evidence that is not guesswork, and it is not a budget. UK companies file annual accounts, and Rockstar Games UK Limited files its staff costs with Companies House. A Reddit user added six years of those filings up, and Notebookcheck relayed the list on 30 March 2026; we read Notebookcheck’s list again on 23 September 2026 and the six figures below are as it prints them:

• 2019–20 — £191M
• 2020–21 — £223M
• 2021–22 — £346M
• 2022–23 — £316M
• 2023–24 — £315M
• 2024–25 — £282M

Those six figures add up to £1.67 billion. The compilation that put them in circulation gave the total as “at least £2.1 billion”, around $2.7 billion, a sum its own list does not reach; we print the arithmetic of the figures as listed, and we have not read the filings ourselves. Each yearly figure is a real number filed with a real regulator. The total is somebody’s addition on top of them.

Why it is not the answer to the question

Three reasons, all of which the people who compiled it say themselves and most of the sites repeating it leave out:

• It is not only GTA 6. That studio also spent those years supporting GTA Online and Red Dead Online. There is no line in the filings splitting it.
• It is not the whole company. GTA 6 was built across Rockstar studios in several countries, and their costs are not in one UK filing.
• It is wages only. Not motion capture, not marketing, not the distribution deal — and for a game of this size, marketing alone is a large number.

So it is simultaneously too big and too small to be a budget, which is why a figure that sounds precise can point in either direction.

How long has it been in development?

Long, and the exact start is not public. Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two’s chief executive, said on the company’s earnings call of 15 May 2025 that Grand Theft Auto VI began development in earnest in 2020, following the massive success of Red Dead Redemption 2; we read that in a published transcript rather than hearing the call. “In earnest” by definition leaves pre-production earlier — that is the load-bearing part of the phrase and it is usually dropped.

Between the first trailer in December 2023 and release on 19 November 2026 alone, there are almost three years, which includes both delays.

The question underneath: is it the most expensive game ever made?

Nobody can say, because the comparison needs two disclosed budgets and there are none. What the filings support is narrower and still worth having: a UK studio’s staff costs alone ran past £1.6 billion across six years in which GTA 6 was its main project, on the studio’s own filed accounts. Any page that turns that into a ranking has added the ranking itself. When Take-Two discloses a figure, on an earnings call or in a filing, it will be here with the date; until then the honest answer to the question is the one at the top of this page.

What we do not know

• The budget. Not roughly, not within a billion.
• When development actually started.
• The team size, at any point.
• What Rockstar would have to sell to break even, which is what most of these figures are really being used to argue about.