Based on a report from Scottish newspaper The Scotsman, Rockstar’s upcoming open-world game Grand Theft Auto V was made on a marketing and development budget of £170 million (or $265 million). This makes it the most expensive video game production in history. In comparison with Hollywood films, it is second only to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End - the current record-holder for the most expensive film production – which had a $300 million budget.

In development for the past five years, Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar have put everything into making sure GTA V is the greatest open-world game ever. With over 2.5 million pre-orders already in just the US, analysts are expecting it to be one of the most-sold games of this console generation. GTA IV has so far sold over 25 million copies; how well will GTA V do?

GTA V launches worldwide on September 17 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Have you pre-ordered your copy yet?

"it is second only to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End" is wrong. When you include advertising, as the GTAV budget did, Avatar and I'm sure way more movies were more expensive.

I think GTAV will sell 45m across all platforms (if PC/PS4/X1 ports, if not then 35m).

Waoo, it need to sell around 8 to 10 million to break even. We all know it will sell more than 20 million but it's still a huge number to break even.  Next gen  version confirmed.

So basically, it needs to sell 10m to be profitable... It will sell at least 20m

Oh yeah and don't forget that they are effectively creating to games, GTA V and GTA Online

It's great to see Take 2 treat R* this way, instead of trying to get the most possible money out of them, they get the best quality out of them and just keep decent amounts of money coming out. We all know that they could get a LOT more from them, but this is the best way for the series

It'll do that in a few days lol. Crazy.

That's crazy, I didn't realise the budget was so high

I don't know if this is true. First of all Avatar was a much bigger project than Pirates of the Carribean 4. Especially when counting marketing costs as well. The only plausible reason is perhaps that they needed first a lot of licenses for music, more voice actors than usual and motion capturing.

However if this amount is true than that means we're going to see a lot of advertising everywhere on this world and perhaps the costs of a PC/next-gen versions are included.

Amazing.They´ll easily make that money back.

I really don't understand where the money for GTA goes....

Never trust these numbers. It could be correct, but so could any other random number.