Photo Credit: Rockstar Games
Rockstar Games’ GTA 6, the highly anticipated latest title in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, has cost well over a billion dollars to develop—and it is packed to the gills with great music.
Rockstar Games’ first major look at Grand Theft Auto 6 was chalk full of licensed music, which is excellent news for fans of the franchise who have come to expect a killer soundtrack. In a 26-minute gameplay footage reveal, Rockstar showed off tracks across genres, from rock and rap to everything in between. Oh, and gameplay, of course.
In addition to securing some iconic music—which couldn’t have been cheap—Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two also estimates it spent well over a billion dollars to develop the game. At an approximate $1 billion to $1.5 billion, that would make GTA 6 the most expensive video game ever made.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick couldn’t disclose exactly how much developing the game had cost so far, but he did admit, “It was expensive.” And it’s not unusual for major “triple-A” video game budgets to exceed hundreds of millions of dollars.
For example, The Last of Us: Part II and Horizon: Forbidden West were revealed (accidentally, via documents submitted to the Xbox Federal Trade Commission) to have each cost more than $200 million to develop. Last year, the development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed by court documents to have cost Activision around $700 million—just for the Black Ops Cold War title alone.
But spending that kind of dough to develop a video game means you have cash to spare. For GTA 6, that translates to licensing tracks for an awesome soundtrack that meets the expectations built over nearly 30 years.
Here’s every song revealed to be in Grand Theft Auto 6 so far:
- “Pop Bottles” – Birdman, Lil Wayne
- “Pound Town” – Sexyy Red, Tay Keith
- “Skrilla” – Kodak Black
- “Let Your Love Flow” – The Bellamy Brothers
- “Love Bites” – Def Leppard
- “People Are People” – Depeche Mode
- “But I Think It’s a Dream” – Captain & Tennille
- “Cars and Girls” – Prefab Sprout
- “Off the Grid” – !!! (Chk Chk Chk) featuring Meah Pace
- “Devil Woman” – Cliff Richard
- “Se Me Nota (Agarrame) – B-One, Chimbala, Omega
- “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” – Phil Collins
- “Mine O’ Mine” – Aluna, Jayda G
- “Inner Light” – Elderbrook, Bob Moses
There’s plenty more where that came from, too. With a story play through that will be around 80 hours long, there will be many opportunities for players to rock out to the soundtrack while driving around Vice City. GTA 6 launches on PS5 and Xbox Series on November 19.