GTA 6: The Billion-Dollar Behemoth That Could Crash the Industry

They’re calling it the biggest entertainment launch of all time – a record GTA 6 is set to smash, currently held by none other than its own direct predecessor. It seems like a no-brainer that developers Rockstar and publisher Take Two will be popping champagne corks like a 21-gun salute come November, but will it be a party or a funeral? The only difference, after all, is context.

GTA 5 remains one of the most expensive games ever made, with a combined development and marketing budget believed to be well over $250 million, numbers already utterly eclipsed by GTA 5’s protracted, beleaguered development cycle which has been marred by hostile data breaches and various internal struggles, but is also reportedly spending unfathomable resources on realistic details like breakable glass and water physics.

This wouldn’t exactly be a leftfield move from the studio that brought you Seasonally Affected Horse Genitals, so it’s doubly unsurprising that GTA 6 is currently believed to be well over $1 billion into its practically infinite budget, and that’s before the promised 2026 marketing blitz has even kicked off in earnest.

In short, GTA 6 will have to be one of the best-selling games of all time just to break even. To be considered a success worthy of the time and money that’s been crammed into it, the expectations are mind-altering: anything less than 20 million sales on day one will likely be considered a disappointment. This thing could make more money than Brazil and still trigger a bunch of layoffs because we live in hell.

With the global economy teetering on the edge of disaster, and a runaway cost of living crisis that’s eating every last penny of disposable income out of average household budget, it won’t take much to turn a chorus of champagne corks into a firing squad aimed directly at the games industry’s already-exposed guts. And so, Take-Two’s CEO is right to be terrified: if they get something as fundamental as the base price wrong, the results could be apocalyptic, not just for his company but for the games industry at large.

Despite the eye-watering amount of money spaffed during its protracted development, GTA 6 is going to make money gland over fist. That’s not in dispute. The question is whether it makes enough: and with so many stakeholders involved, “enough” is a difficult concept to nail down.

So that’s the first problem GTA 6 has: It could do more business than any video game before it, and still fall short of expectations.

The concept of success in the corporate bureaucracy of a publicly traded company is arcane, ever changing, and subject to factors completely outside anyone’s control: We live in a vast, interconnected global economy that runs on chaos theory. A proverbial butterfly flaps its wings, or grounds an oil tanker, and all of a sudden, there’s a hurricane on the other side of the planet, or a banana now costs twenty dollars.

Had GTA 6 come out during its initial release window back in 2025, there probably wouldn’t have even been a question mark about its price tag, but now it finds itself releasing in an existentially frightening year for all tech and creative industries, where the spiralling cost of making and selling computer hardware is killing businesses and turning casual hobbies into expensive luxuries, where middle-class consumers are struggling more and more to justify any frivolous expenses because the energy and food bills they used to barely think about are now all-consuming. For an increasing amount of people, even the now standard MSRP of $70 is out of the question for a piece of entertainment no matter how hyped or hotly anticipated it is. The higher that number goes, the more people are going to just wait until a sale.

In a world in thrall to the knee-jerk whims of the stock market, any major hit to those crucial first few weeks of sales could be a major problem for Take Two, and also present a cat among the pigeons in terms of wider industry investment. If the industry is so screwed that even its biggest golden goose fails to lay enough eggs, then what hope does any other project have? Yes, it would be a stupid, unnuanced, self-sabotaging conclusion for investors to draw, but boardroom capitalism is often an arena of nonsense and vibes.

In short, perception is everything: if GTA is “too expensive,” it might miss targets in that initial window of launch week hype, and the consequences of that would be ludicrously far-reaching.

However, a diminished short-term performance of GTA 6 might not be an issue as it will likely, eventually, provide the basis for GTA Online 2.0: Much of the reason that GTA 5 continues to enjoy such longevity as a going concern is because of its ever growing, ever evolving online component. And its capacity for printing seemingly infinite money is the reason why Rockstar is allowed to spend nearly a decade ploughing billions into the GTA 6 furnace while the rest of the industry just burns down.

But without a reasonably low barrier to entry, the next GTA Online might face an uphill battle for attendance, with its chief competition being its own predecessor that Rockstar will continue supporting beyond GTA 6’s release. It’s not a given that GTA Online’s current players will make the jump: convincing people to go from an established, content-rich platform to essentially starting again from scratch is an age-old problem faced by anyone cultivating a large online community. At some point, growth requires new pastures, but you can’t make people eat grass.

We’ve seen the unthinkable happen before in Red Dead Online: once tipped to be a sister or successor project to its GTA equivalent that is now more or less abandoned by the devs because, well, it just didn’t have the juice. Now, an online western is a very different proposition to the chaotic urban playground provided by GTA Online, but both projects shared much of their core DNA and there was no reason to think, with the runaway success of Red Dead 2, that Red Dead Online couldn’t tap new audiences and do as well or even better than its stablemate. It simply wasn’t meant to be.

GTA 6’s long-term prospects are currently very precarious, which means that Rockstar’s position in the industry as a studio whose entire USP is the ability to plough infinite money into everything it does is also precarious.

Finally, the real issue here is that so much of the games industry finds itself both scared by and dependent on the success of one single project. Every time GTA 6’s release date changes, the rest of the industry reorganises itself to give it a wide berth, like Moses parting the Red Sea with nob gags. It has affected the lives and livelihoods of countless people who aren’t even directly involved with GTA but whose own studios and publishers have to navigate the choppy waters left in its wake. The games media ecosystem is in a state of constant flux right now as we keep betting the farm on a big GTA 6 content push that has so far failed to materialise twice, and this has led directly to a lot of turmoil.

It shouldn’t be like this. Our industry long touted itself as recession proof, and entirely insulated from petty mainstream ideas of what constitutes art, what constitutes a valid pastime. Now, we find ourselves at the hard, bleeding edge of the consequences of a world order in its death throes, a civilisation on the brink. How did we get to a place where the most important piece of media in my entire lifetime is, as much as I adore it, a wilfully stupid game about car theft and blowjobs?

GTA 6 will be brilliant, and do a phenomenal amount of business by any reasonable standard – it’s unthinkable to suggest otherwise. But we live in a time of the unthinkable becoming reality. And on that basis, we need to brace ourselves for the possibility that GTA 6, rather than being the saviour of the video games industry, might trigger its next big crash.

Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn't fawning over Assassin's Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and eating stuff. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social, and check out The Trinca Perspective playlist over on IGN's YouTube channel!