GTA6’s cost denial meets an audited filing

On 14 October Bloomberg Businessweek published Jason Schreier’s account of how Grand Theft Auto VI was made, built on a day of interviews at Rockstar North in Edinburgh. In it Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar’s head of publishing, rejected the claim that the game cost more than the $1.5 billion it took to build Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, and declined to give the real figure. That is a ceiling rather than a disclosure, and it is worth reading against the estimates already on the record instead of on its own. Industry analysts quoted by Business Insider in May 2026 put the spend at $1 billion to $1.5 billion, a range whose top end is the same figure Kolbe has now ruled out — so the denial removes the higher claims, which trace to an unverified 2023 hacker message relayed by Gulf News as a $2 billion budget, and leaves the reported range exactly where it was. Nobody has published a figure with a method attached, and the publisher has still not named one.

There is a document in this argument that the week’s coverage did not open, and it is filed every year. Rockstar’s principal studio is a British company. Rockstar Games UK Limited, registered number 03312220, changed its name from Rockstar North Limited on 22 December 2021, and it files full audited accounts at Companies House on the same annual cycle as any other private company in the United Kingdom. The set covering the year ended 31 March 2025 was audited by Ernst and Young LLP, signed on 5 December 2025 and filed on 3 January 2026. Its strategic report explains why no game budget is in it and why something better is: the company calls itself “a cost plus entity”, whose turnover “represents the recharge made by the company to its ultimate parent company, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. as a remuneration for its activity”. Note 2 puts that turnover at £508,868,000, attributable entirely to markets outside the United Kingdom, “being the United States of America”. This studio sells development work to its parent. It does not sell games.

What the accounts state about the people is the part that answers the question. The average monthly number of persons employed, including directors, was 1,744 across the year, up from 1,658: 1,625 in development and 119 in administration. Their staff costs came to £363,099,000 — £282,672,000 of wages and salaries, £27,986,000 of social security, £6,784,000 of pension contributions and £45,657,000 of equity-settled share-based payments. Turnover was £508,868,000, operating profit £18,453,000, profit for the year £87,060,000, and the company paid its parent a dividend of £85,000,000. Those are audited numbers for one legal entity in one year, and they are not a game budget. The accounts name no title, and the entity employs the people who work on whatever Rockstar’s British studios are building, which includes the continuing GTA Online service. The same week’s interviews give the only figure that can be set beside it: Rockstar told Bloomberg it now has 4,711 staff across 12 offices as of August, so this one entity’s average of 1,744 is a little over a third of the group.

Divide the staff figures and something counter-intuitive appears. Staff cost per head was £208,199 for the year, of which £162,083 was wages and salaries, against £190,411 of wages per head in the previous year. Average wages in the entity therefore fell 14.9% while the average number of employees rose 5.2%, and the total staff bill fell from £404,387,000 to £363,099,000. Two of the four lines account for almost all of the drop: wages and salaries fell £33,010,000 and share-based payments fell £8,962,000. What the accounts cannot do is say why, and the filing separates none of the candidates. A change in the mix of people hired, a year with less overtime or fewer completion payments, and the arithmetic of averaging a growing workforce across twelve months would each produce a lower average wage. This site will not pick one on the document’s behalf.

The largest itemised public payment in this story is not in the interviews and not in any news report. Note 8 shows the company received a corporation tax credit of £60,124,000 for the year against a pre-tax profit of £26,936,000, and the credit is larger than the profit because of one line inside it: £70,778,000 of Video Games Tax Relief, down from £73,121,000 the year before. That relief is a United Kingdom subsidy for video game development, and it is the only number in the argument about what GTA6 cost that a tax authority has assessed and an auditor has signed. Two years of it come to £143,899,000, and the year to 31 March 2025 alone is equivalent to 19.5% of that year’s staff costs. Note 4 records a smaller sign of how these claims are handled in practice: HMRC paid the company £7.0m of interest for settling the credits late. The accounts attribute none of the relief to a title, and this page will not either.

Put the two halves together and the argument resolves without a winner. The claim that circulated earlier this year, relayed by the Spanish outlet Vandal from a March 2026 social post, is that Rockstar North had spent over $2.1 billion on salaries and wages since 2019, read off these same filings. That is a sum of the staff cost line above across several years of a single entity. It is not a game budget: it counts one office group out of twelve, it adds social security and share awards to wages, and it covers years in which this studio also worked on GTA Online. A cost-plus recharge of £508,868,000 in one year and a denied budget of above $1.5 billion across a project are measurements of different things, which is why both can hold at once. For anyone buying on 19 November none of it changes the product: the Standard Edition is $79.99, the Ultimate Edition $99.99 and digital pre-load opens on 12 November. It does change where to look next, and there is a date for that. Accounts for the year to 31 March 2026 are due at Companies House by 31 December 2026 — the first set filed after the game ships, and the only one anybody has to sign.