GTA 5 rumoured to be most expensive game ever made at £170 million
It’s already the most hotly anticipated game of the year, and now Grand Theft Auto 5 looks like it’s going to get another accolade ahead of its release. According to The Scotsman, the latest crime sim game may also be the most expensive game ever made.
With marketing and development costs combined, Rockstar’s latest open-world epic is thought to have cost some $266 million, or roughly £170 million.
While Rockstar’s own representatives decline to comment on the figure, Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia used a “hypothetical probability model” earlier this year to estimate development costs of $137.5 million. With an extensive marketing campaign really kicking into gear now, that $266 million figure doesn’t seem all that outlandish.
The game currently officially holding the most-expensive ever title was Bioware/EA’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, which had cost $200 million to develop.
Not that such figures will phase Rockstar – analysts are expecting GTA 5 to sell 25 million copies in its first year on sale alone, representing £1 billion ($1.56 billion) in sales.
