[STEAM] Take-Two CEO dodges disclosing GTA 6 cost, but says perfection isn’t cheap

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Grand Theft Auto 6 is the most anticipated game of 2026, and perhaps even of all time. It’s been 13 years since the last game in the series came out, with Rockstar raking in billions of dollars from its online component, as well as another blockbuster release, Red Dead Redemption 2.

And making these gigantic games is no small feat financially. According to some estimates, GTA 5 cost Rockstar a whopping $265 million, while approximations for Red Dead Redemption 2 range from anywhere between $350 and $550 million. Just paying out salaries to so many developers is bound to rack up quite a bill over a 10-year ******* or longer, so it’s safe to assume these estimates, while rough, are probably not far from the actual numbers.

But when asked about it directly, the chief of Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two Interactive refused to reveal just how much GTA 6 cost the company. In an interview with CNBC, Strauss Zelnick said the production costs for the game are “high” but said the company hasn’t disclosed the exact figures.

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Strauss avoiding the question on how much GTA 6 has cost to develop.

The interviewer did try to press him a little about the game itself.

But he remained quite broad with his answers.

“We do spend a lot of money on our console and PC titles and that’s because we seek…

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— RockStation (@rockstationonx)

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“We do spend a lot of money on our console and PC titles, and that’s because we seek perfection in everything we do,” he explained, adding that, considering the size of the interactive entertainment industry and how much it depends on hits, rising costs are more or less unavoidable.

Much like film budgets have ballooned over the past decade or so, we can only expect the same to happen in games, especially considering that video games are probably the single largest entertainment industry in the world. Rockstar and Take-Two have generally dominated it since at least 2013, with GTA 5 being the most profitable piece of entertainment in history.

While we’ll probably never know exactly how much the game cost, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were over a billion at this point. Making games of this caliber requires top-level talent, a lot of hours, and a lot of manpower, not to mention all of the technology that probably didn’t even exist and was developed solely for the game. Rockstar also uses its own RAGE engine, so relying on existing software and solutions just wasn’t an option, and that is going to increase the expenditure by a significant amount.

Even if GTA 6 is double what previous games cost to make, Take-Two seemingly expects to make most of that back. In yesterday’s Take-Two investors call, Zelnick

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and shared that

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with the game’s release.

But, at the end of the day, all that matters is if the game is good. As Zelnick himself said, quality is the only metric for gamers, and if a game plays well, runs well, and is a fun experience overall, the broader community couldn’t care less about the production costs.

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