Rockstar rejects $1.5 billion GTA 6 budget rumor but won’t give the real cost
Rockstar has knocked down the most repeated number attached to Grand Theft Auto VI’s budget without replacing it with a real one. In a making-of feature published by Bloomberg in October 2026, Jason Schreier reports that publishing head Jennifer Kolbe dismissed the rumor that the game cost more than the $1.5 billion spent building Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, while declining to say what it did cost. What Rockstar will put on record is scale: more than eight years of work and a company that now employs 4,711 people.
What we know
The core fact comes straight from Bloomberg’s feature. Schreier writes that Rockstar won’t say how much GTA VI cost, but Kolbe shot down the popular claim that the figure passed the $1.5 billion Burj Khalifa benchmark. Coverage of the same interview by GamesRadar+ and This Week in Videogames matches that account: executives, Kolbe included, declined to provide a budget, and no number was disclosed.
Bloomberg then adds its own judgment. Based on the time and labor involved, the outlet says GTA VI is almost certainly the most expensive video game ever made. File that under Bloomberg’s analysis. Rockstar did not say it.
On timeline, Bloomberg reports that making GTA VI took more than eight years, a stretch that included two delays and what development lead Rob Nelson described as a “dark period” when the vision for the game was not yet clear. Bloomberg also reports that Rockstar’s work on Red Dead Redemption II pushed GTA VI back by several years. The studio once juggled multiple games across its offices; per Bloomberg, the bulk of staff now focus on one project at a time.
On headcount, Bloomberg puts Rockstar at 2,441 employees when Red Dead Redemption II launched in 2018, and 4,711 staff across 12 offices now. Other outlets citing the report date that figure to August 2026. That is a company-wide count, not a tally of people assigned to GTA VI.
Two secondary claims fall apart against those numbers. The “more than 6,000 developers on GTA 6” figure circulating in some coverage does not match Bloomberg’s 4,711 total. The “nine years” and “nearly 5,000 people” framing in headlines from outlets such as WN Hub also drifts from Bloomberg’s wording, which is “more than eight years” and 4,711 staff. Other outlets have gone the other direction and said “almost eight years.” Bloomberg’s phrasing is the reference point.
What is rumored
The $1.5 billion figure did not come from a leak. It traces to analyst Michael Pachter, who estimated that GTA VI’s cost exceeded that amount, as GamesRadar+ describes. The estimate spread widely enough to become a default online assumption. Pachter is a long-standing industry analyst, but this was a projection, not inside information, and Rockstar has never published a budget. Kolbe’s pushback, as reported by Bloomberg, undercuts the estimate without telling us how far off it was.
A second rumor concerns the cost of the final delay. Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson reported that the extra six months added by the second slip, to November 19, 2026, ran Rockstar and Take-Two roughly $10 million per month in additional development expenses. That claim reached us through Men’s Journal and AOL rather than directly. Insider Gaming is a recognised games outlet with a track record on Rockstar coverage, but neither Rockstar nor Take-Two has confirmed the figure.
A broader band of $1 billion to $2 billion, with some analysts going higher, appears in secondary write-ups from outlets including Men’s Journal, AOL and Gulf News. All of these are unofficial estimates built on public inputs such as headcount and years in development. None rests on a disclosed budget, because there isn’t one.
What it means
The honest answer to “how much did GTA 6 cost” is that nobody outside Rockstar and Take-Two knows, and the one figure most people were quoting is now off the table. Kolbe’s denial is narrow. She rejected a specific threshold, not the idea that the game was expensive. The denial could mean the real number sits well below $1.5 billion, or just below it. Rockstar gave Bloomberg nothing to narrow that range.
The “most expensive game ever” claim survives on a different footing. Bloomberg reached it by reasoning from eight-plus years and a workforce that nearly doubled over the project, from 2,441 in 2018 to 4,711 in August 2026. That is a defensible inference, and readers should treat it as exactly that.
The operational context matters more than the headline number. Per Bloomberg, Red Dead Redemption II cost GTA VI several years, and the studio has since shifted to concentrating staff on one game at a time. Rockstar also told Bloomberg that the next game should not take another eight years, which reads as a statement of intent about process rather than budget.
For buyers, the relevant figures are the ones Rockstar has committed to: a November 19, 2026 release on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S after two delays, with no PC version announced. On price, Gagadget’s summary of the Bloomberg feature says Take-Two chief Strauss Zelnick pointed to a $70 to $80 range, and its headline cites $79.99. We have not independently verified that figure, so treat it as reported, not settled.