Mountains emerged. Rivers carved canyons. And a whole bunch of other stuff happened between the release of GTA 5 and the impending launch of GTA 6. In that time, developer Rockstar Games, in step with the broader games industry, ballooned in size and racked up expenses to match. But long before the days of production budgets estimated to be comfortably north of $1 billion, a new Grand Theft Auto could be built in a cave with a box of scraps – which is to say, developed in a few years by under 100 people on a reported budget of $10 million.
In the final run-up to GTA 6, a harrowing fact has struck the Grand Theft Auto community. Reshared online by veteran game developer Del Walker of Naughty Dog and Respawn fame, an archived news story from USA Today in 2006 notes that GTA: San Andreas had sold over 12 million copies roughly 16 months after its October 2004 launch. If you (somewhat generously) assume that all of those sales were made at the game’s $50 base price, that comes to about $600 million.
This figure was widely reported in the storm of coverage orbiting San Andreas’ famous “Hot Coffee” incident, appearing in other articles (like this one from NBC News) that are still listed today.
Another figure helps put that gross revenue – which wouldn’t translate directly to Rockstar or publisher Take-Two Interactive’s share – into context. GTA: San Andreas was made on a reported budget of roughly $10 million, and we have two solid sources for that.
A December 21, 2004 article from The Wall Street Journal (paywalled) is cited by Wikipedia and references a $10 million budget for the game. Accounting for inflation, $10 million in 2004 is worth about $18 million in today’s money.
An issue of The Ottawa Citizen, an Ontario, Canada-based newspaper, was released on the same day and is also archived online (again, paywalled), with a relevant snippet pulled out and cited by the GTA Fandom wiki. It quotes then-Take-Two president Paul Eibeler, who left the publisher in 2007, as saying San Andreas was made with a budget of “less than $10 million.”
It’s fascinating to see this $10 million figure in conversation, because this cost threshold has recently been used as a soft reference point for what AA game development can look like – a mid-sized, responsibly budgeted and scoped game that punches above its weight, and a potential retreat for studios worn down by the boom-and-bust bets of today’s AAA games.
Today, GTA represents the pinnacle of high-budget development, the kind of swing that only GTA can get away with, and the kind of game that only Rockstar can make at this scale and fidelity thanks to its pedigree, backing, and army of employees (and outsourced contributors). Oh, and GTA 6 costs $100 if you want everything in it – that’d be the Ultimate Edition – or $80 at base, which has become the new price ceiling for some AAA games.
As Walker puts it: “Finding out San Andreas cost like $10 mil to make, and made back $600 million without DLC, multiplayer or microtransactions, is like watching someone dunk barefoot.” Meanwhile, the lion’s share of GTA 5’s ample profits were harvested through GTA Online monetization over several years. If anything, GTA 6 is first and foremost a platform for Rockstar’s next big online component.
The most prominent touchstone here is probably Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a breakout turn-based RPG from Sandfall Interactive, a small French developer made up of mostly junior staff. Its budget was also under $10 million, just to put into perspective how much game development costs have exploded in 20 years.
Before, that kind of money could get you a new Grand Theft Auto. Now it’s, well, certainly not chump change, but it’s a rounding error to GTA, which is as good a cipher. And today, large publishers, and the smaller companies treading water in the same industry’s financial currents, are reckoning with those costs, in part by laying off thousands of people as a lot of those bets lose.
The kicker is that the controversy that spawned much of this reporting, which orbited a January 2006 lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles city attorney office and accusing Rockstar of concealing pornographic content in GTA: San Andreas (sex scenes accessible only by modders), may have impacted its sales due to retailers pulling the game from shelves. Being removed from stores certainly makes it hard to sell a game, but equally, you might argue that the Hot Coffee notoriety only fueled sales before and after the brief disappearance from retail.
As it happens, that 2004 newspaper article also contains a prophetic quote regarding game development budgets. A Microsoft spokeswoman discussing the cost of Halo 2 comments on the, even then, rising budgets of games. (According to a July 2015 presentation from Microsoft veteran Chip Pedersen, Halo 2 cost $40 million to make and another $80 million to market. I shudder to think what Take-Two has spent marketing GTA 6.)
“The costs to create stellar games continue to increase, but we are looking at ways to help the industry streamline rising costs,” she said. I don’t know who this woman is or where she is now, but I hope she understands just how right she was.