GTA 6: Rockstar Denies the 1.5 Billion Dollar Budget Rumor

Rockstar's Jennifer Kolbe told Bloomberg GTA 6 did not cost more than 1.5 billion dollars, but the studio still won't share the real figure.

Rockstar has denied that GTA 6 cost more than 1.5 billion dollars, according to a Bloomberg report published on October 14, 2026. What it has not done is say how much the game actually cost: the exact figure remains under wraps.

As reported by Pasquale Pillitteri, the clarification came from Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing, in a long piece by Jason Schreier. Vandal and Reporte Indigo run headlines along the same lines: Rockstar does not confirm the budget, but rejects the number that had been circulating for months.

A ceiling, not a number

The denial deserves a careful read. Saying the spend does not exceed 1.5 billion sets an upper limit; it does not announce an amount. A cost of 1.4 billion and one of 900 million would both fit the statement. If any headline presented it as a new figure, it got ahead of itself: no number has been published.

Where the rumor came from

According to the source, the figure appears to originate in a July 2025 Gulf News article that dozens of sites then repeated. Earlier this year Business Insider mentioned a range of 1 to 1.5 billion, also based on analyst estimates. Neither had a document from Rockstar or Take-Two in hand.

GTA 6 is still the most expensive

The denial does not knock GTA 6 off the top spot. Bloomberg considers it almost certainly the most expensive game ever made. The comparisons being cited, though, mix apples and oranges: Marathon (over 250 million) and Concord (around 200 million) are development figures; Black Ops Cold War's 700 million covers its whole lifecycle, per a court filing; and Star Citizen's billion-plus is accumulated revenue, not a production budget.

It is also unclear what counts toward the total. For a game this size marketing is a big slice, and a development budget and an all-in budget can differ by hundreds of millions. Quoting a number without saying what it includes says very little.

Other clues, with caveats

The report mentions an amateur reading of Rockstar North's public UK filings, showing 1.6 billion pounds in salaries between 2019 and 2025. That figure also covers work on GTA Online and Red Dead Online, and it is not a statement from the studio, so it cannot pin down the game's cost. A headcount of 4,711 across 12 offices, versus 2,441 in 2018, is also cited; the source attributes it to GTAVice and we could not verify it.

What we still don't know

There is no official figure and, for now, nothing suggests one is coming. The sales forecasts that accompany the report (40 million copies and 3 billion dollars in the first four months) are analyst estimates, not Rockstar data. The game launches on November 19, and we will keep covering what gets confirmed on the blog.

Note: Reporte Indigo and Vandal could only be read by headline; the detail comes from Pasquale Pillitteri's text, which itself cites Bloomberg.