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.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/grand-theft-auto/gta-6-and-san-andreas-show-how-much-game-development-has-changed-in-the-00s-rockstar-turned-a-clair-obscur-expedition-33-sized-budget-into-usd600-million
