Everyone is talking about GTA 6, released on November 19, 2026 for Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S… but why? One element is certainly the cost: it seems they invested more than a billion dollars. It would be an absolute record and so today we will see why it cost so much and how much it could earn. And above all, what do hacker attacks have to do with this whole story.
Brief history of Grand Theft Auto: the action video game from Rockstar games
GTA, the first chapter, was born in Scotland in ’97 and was a simple game with a top-down view where you played a criminal who stole cars and escaped from the police. In 1999 the second chapter was released under Rockstar but it was with the third that everything changed. We moved to entirely 3D graphics, set in an open and fully explorable world. In 2002 it was the turn of Vice City, with its 80s neon atmosphere. In 2004 San Andreas arrived, with a huge map for the time and in 2008 it was the turn of GTA IV, which technically improved everything done up to that point.
Then, on September 17, 2013, GTA V comes out. And this is where the numbers get absurd. According to Take-Two, Rockstar’s parent company, the game has sold over 220 million copies to date, and overall revenue is estimated at around $10 billion. Much of the credit goes to an online mode which, imagine, has been going on for more than ten years and which is still extremely active. GTA V was therefore not only a successful video game, but one of the most profitable entertainment products in history, also including cinema and music.
You understand well that after thirteen years of waiting, a new chapter is no longer an event for gamers only: it is a mass cultural event, which will certainly be talked about for years. A clue to this can be found in the calendar of video game releases: many publishers have emptied the month of November so as not to end up crushed by its release. And the wait, in all these years, has gotten longer. The game was initially scheduled for Fall 2025, then it was pushed back to May 2026, and finally to November 19, 2026.
In all these years, however, there is a figure that is particularly controversial, namely that this game apparently cost more than a billion dollars. But how is this possible?
Why GTA VI cost so much
Necessary premise: neither Rockstar nor Take-Two have ever communicated an official figure. That billion, billion and a half is the result of estimates made by various analysts, such as those of Business Insider, then also taken up by IGN. Is this such a large figure for the world of video games? The short answer is yes. To give you an idea, GTA V, the previous chapter, would have cost around 265 million and Red Dead Redemption 2 – another Rockstar success – around 540 million. Even if these are not confirmed figures, it must be said that the CEO of Take-Two, Strauss Zelnick, has never denied the order of magnitude and indeed has repeatedly reiterated that the Rockstar teams are guaranteed practically unlimited resources. So let’s say we’re not sure, but it seems like a more than likely figure.
But why was so much money needed?
The staff
The first aspect to consider is that relating to personal. While half of Silicon Valley is pushing to replace creative work with AI, Rockstar has made the opposite choice. Zelnick said it very clearly on the GamesIndustry portal: for GTA VI generative AI had no role, because Rockstar’s worlds are built by hand, building by building and street by street.
But be careful: this does not apply to “classic” artificial intelligence, the one that has always guided traffic, pedestrians and police in video games. And speaking of pedestrians: according to what was reported by the New York Times, the characters in GTA VI overall can count on over 600 thousand animations, compared to around 55 thousand in GTA V and 300 thousand in Red Dead Redemption 2. It means that every passerby moves, reacts and behaves in a manner consistent with the context. According to the reports released during the previews, the developers also carried out extensive field research in Florida, including police patrols, nightclubs and illegal races, to provide a social cross-section that was as credible as possible.
And all this, of course, comes at a cost. But it’s not over!
The technology
The second big point is that relating to technology behind GTA, in particular the evolution of the RAGE graphics engine. Just to give an example, let’s take water. In most video games, water is a trick: we can imagine it as a sheet of polygons with an animated texture on top. According to the analyzes of the material shown so far, however, in GTA VI the ocean is simulated in real time. The result is that if a tropical storm arrives in the game, the wind generates waves that crash on the rocks and can invade the roads on the coast. And the same goes for many other examples.
Then there is a very interesting patent that Take Two filed in September 2024. Here too, without going into too much detail, it is a system that adapts the animation of the character’s skeleton in real time with the object it is touching, so here too it is a simulation of how the character’s body interacts in a realistic way with the objects around it. It must be said that Take-Two, at least until today, has never directly associated this patent with GTA VI, but it is difficult to imagine a more suitable game.
Added to all this is lighting calculated with ray tracing, i.e. simulating the path of light rays on shop windows, wet asphalt, etc. In short, you understand well how all this is extremely complex to develop and, consequently, expensive.
Marketing
Marketing deserves a separate chapter. For a game like this you would expect space campaigns, billboards everywhere and commercials on TV. Instead, Rockstar’s strategy for years has been the opposite: silence. The company disappears for months, releases no details, and then suddenly releases a trailer or even just an image. That void causes the world’s media to talk about it, and for free. And then there is the most sensational move: the agreement with Netflix. On August 27, the platform premiered a 27-minute video shot entirely on PlayStation 5. It remained a Netflix exclusive for six hours, before arriving for free on YouTube.
But the most absurd thing is that, just as millions of people were waiting for that preview, someone in the shadows was preparing the coup. And that day would become the perfect time to cash out. But I’ll tell you about this in a bit, when we get to hackers.
But if the company has taken on such a significant sum, what economic return do they expect from this game?
Economic return: receipts and prices for standard and ultimate versions
Consider that pre-orders started on June 25th and, according to the analysis company Newzoo, in the last week of June alone the game would have grossed around 180 million dollars in digital pre-orders between the United States and the five main European markets. At the end of October, however, there was talk of something like 4 million copies sold for around 430 million dollars. But not only that: Newzoo estimates that the game could reach 4.5 billion dollars in sales in its launch week alone. In the long term, the real driving force will be the new online mode, which in the case of GTA 5 has continued to generate money for over a decade.
But all that glitters is not gold. The first major criticism of the game is the price. The standard edition costs $79.99 and the Ultimate edition costs $99.99. GTA VI therefore becomes one of the first major games to exceed 70 dollars, creating a further precedent with which the industry could align itself.
The second is the disappearance of disk. For the first time in the history of the series, the version you buy in stores will only contain a code to download the game. Zelnick explained that Take-Two’s business is now more than 90% digital and that, for such a big game, discs no longer make much sense. And this is actually not an isolated case: Sony has announced that it will stop producing discs for PS5 games released after January 2028. The problem, for enthusiasts and consumer associations, is that without the disc you cannot resell the used game, and ownership depends entirely on the account and servers of the digital store.
The crazy thing is that these criticisms have become the perfect pretext for a hacker attack. Indeed, for the latest in a long series, because GTA VI has been in the crosshairs for years.
Hackers, leaks and the Cyberleek case
It all starts on September 18, 2022 with the most catastrophic leak in the history of video games: over 90 videos and 60 minutes of gameplay from an internal build, stolen and released online. So much so that the FBI opens an investigation. Then, in December 2023, the first trailer ended up on Twitter a few hours before release, forcing Rockstar to publish it urgently in the middle of the night.
But the most absurd case is this year. Cyberleek appears in August, an anonymous entity that disseminates unreleased clips, presenting itself as a rebel against the farewell to physical discs and digital pre-orders. Behind it, however, there is a very specific financial mechanism: in mid-August it created a cryptocurrency, $CYBERLEEK, and put a QR code on each video that refers to the token. The concept is simple: the higher the value of the currency, the more leaks there will be. And to make it go up you have to buy it. On August 27, a few hours before the premiere on Netflix, Cyberleek cashes in. According to CoinDesk, he takes home around 270 thousand dollars. Rockstar calls the leaks “heartbreaking” and Take-Two is turning to the courts to ask Microsoft and Discord for the data needed to identify him.
The story, however, does not end here. In October Cyberleek returns with new videos and launches an ultimatum: if the token reaches 30 million dollars in capitalization, it will spread the entire game. In exchange he offers Take-Two a way out: print physical discs and apologize publicly. The token reaches a peak of around 7.6-7.8 million, then collapses. On October 14th comes the twist: Cyberleek declares the leak season closed, with a final video entitled “The End of the Road“. He says he still has the complete build, but doesn’t want to publish it because it would ruin the experience for players. In the meantime, the capitalization has fallen to around 1.2-1.7 million, more than 85% below the peak.
Be careful, though: no one has ever verified that Cyberleek actually owns the complete game, and Rockstar has not commented on the October videos. The scheme always seems the same: promise something sensational to make the token rise and make money. Furthermore, be aware that fake GTA VI files full of malware are circulating online. The advice is therefore simple: do not download or buy anything linked to these promises.
