It’s been a long, long wait for Grand Theft Auto V. In fact, the wait has been longer than it should have been, after the games developers temporarily crushed our hopes by delaying its launch by four months. But a week from now, on September 17, GTA V will finally fall into the hands of gamers, and there will be much rejoicing. Well, Rockstar hopes so anyway.
Rockstar North – the development studio based in Edinburgh, Scotland – is the team behind the game and, unsurprisingly, they"re hoping to break new records with it. The Scotsman newspaper reports that the new title has benefited from a budget unprecedented in game production, with £170m (around $267m) allocated for its development and marketing, making it the most expensive video game of all time.
It’s important to put that figure into context. The most expensive movie of all time, even adjusted for inflation, is broadly agreed to be Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, with a total budget of $300m. The most expensive video game to have been produced before GTA V was Star Wars: The Old Republic, with an estimated budget of $200m. By comparison, Grand Theft Auto IV, released five years ago, cost under $100m.
It’s clear that Rockstar has spent some serious coin on GTA V, and with good reason. It’s predicted that 25 million copies of the game could be sold in its first year alone, generating over £1bn ($1.57bn) in revenues.
Of course, it’s never enough to just spend big dollar and assume that will be enough – history is littered with enough expensive flops to make that much clear. But next week, we’ll finally get a chance to find out if that money has been well spent – and whether or not the long, long wait for GTA V was worth it.
Source: The Scotsman via VR-Zone