GTA 5 is the most expensive game ever costing £170m to make

Ahead of next week’s release, Rockstar has confirmed that GTA 5 is the most expensive gamer ever made, costing a whopping £170 million to produce.

Eclipsing the budgets of fellow AAA titles such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and the upcoming Watch Dogs, Rockstar North has revealed that the £170 million spent on building GTA 5 is the highest fee ever splashed out on a game.

With more than three million copies of GTA 5 having already been pre-ordered, it is expected that the eagerly awaited title will recoup its considerable outlay in double quick fashion. It has been suggested that GTA 5 will sell more than 25 million copies during its opening 12 months, generating sales upwards of £1 billion.

Such a large budget looks set to produce one of the biggest games ever made, with the GTA 5 world larger than all previous GTA titles combined.

“What we’ve done is create a world that you can lose yourself in. A place that’s interesting and fun to live in,” Aaron Garbut, Series Art Director at Rockstar North, the Edinburgh based studio responsible for GTA 5 said.

“By any sort of commercial scale, Grand Theft Auto is easily Scotland’s largest cultural export ever,” Brian Baglow, a writer on the first GTA game said in an interview with the Scotsman. “The series has sold something like 135 million copies so far.”

He added: “It’s coming up to 17 years since GTA began and it’s become something I don’t think anyone involved with the original game would have expected.

“The series has come on not just in leaps and bounds, but in long jumps since then. It’s become far more than the sum of its parts, it’s a fully global phenomenon. This is the fifth major release, and the nice thing is that all of them have been made here in Scotland.”

Last week Rockstar suggested that although no GTA 5 Xbox One or GTA 5 PS4 releases had yet been confirmed, the game already ‘feels next-gen’.

“Compared to GTA 4 this [GTA 5] definitely feels ‘next generation’ to us,” Phil Hooker, Associate Technical Director of Rockstar North said in a recent interview.

“When we started we knew the scope of GTA 5 was huge and incredibly ambitious. Fortunately from completing GTA 4 we had a team that was already very familiar with the hardware.”

He added: “Every aspect of the game had to be better, richer in gameplay and more fluid and knowing we were launching on the same platforms meant we could focus on extracting the most out of those consoles and making the game as fantastic as possible.

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