Grand Theft Auto V – you have to spend money to make money

The budget for Grand Theft Auto V is the highest of any video game, it has been revealed ahead of the keenly-awaited title’s release next week.

It is also is more than any movie bar Pirates of the Caribbean 3, with the game expected to make $1.57 billion in just one year.

Although games with a budget of around $100 million are becoming relatively commonplace, the $265 million (£170 million) budget of Grand Theft Auto V is more than double that of 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV.

A number of movies hover around the same mark, including famous flop John Carter, but the only film that cost more to make than Grand Theft Auto V is 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.




More: Is this the official GTA 5 map?

Despite this colossal investment newspaper The Scotsman reports that Grand Theft Auto V is likely to sell 25 million copies in its first year alone, generating sales of £1 billion ($1.57 billion).

Shares in Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive, which has often been in financial trouble despite the success of the franchise, have almost doubled in the past year.

‘By any sort of commercial scale, Grand Theft Auto is easily Scotland’s largest cultural export ever. The series has sold something like 135 million copies so far,’ said Scottish Games Network’s Brian Baglow to The Scotsman.

‘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.’

Although the London-born Dan and Sam Houser are the lead writers and producers for Grand Theft Auto, the franchise has always been made in Scotland.

Development studio Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh, but started life in Dundee as DMA Design – where it made popular 16-bit games such as Lemmings and Unirally.

The new video below shows a compilation of some of Grand Theft Auto V’s new in-game TV commercials, all created using the same graphics engine as the rest of the game.

Thoughts? Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk or leave a comment below