GTA 6 won't cost $100 but it could be made with AI, former Rockstar dev says

A former Rockstar Games technical director says that the studio doesn't need to charge $100 for GTA 6 as GTA Online will bring in tons of money post-launch.

GTA 6 won't cost $100 but it could be made with AI, former Rockstar dev says
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Senior Gaming Editor
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TL;DR: Former Rockstar developer Obbe Vermeij states GTA 6 likely won't have a $100 base price, aligning with the $70 industry standard. With an estimated $2 billion budget, Rockstar is expected to use AI and procedural generation to reduce development costs and automate repetitive tasks, enhancing production efficiency.

Another former Rockstar Games developer says that the studio won't charge $100 for Grand Theft Auto 6...but the big-budget sequel could be crafted using AI.

GTA 6 won't cost $100 but it could be made with AI, former Rockstar dev says 1
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Speculation says that GTA 6 could end up being the world's first $100 video game. While it's possible that Rockstar could release a $100 version of GTA 6, such as a deluxe edition, multiple industry figures don't believe GTA 6 will cost $100 by default. Instead, the popular belief is that GTA 6 will be priced at the new $70 industry standard and that Rockstar will instead rely on GTA Online's microtransaction revenues to augment post-launch sales. This seems like the more likely path, seeing as GTA Online typically earns $100 million every quarter, per our Grand Theft Auto franchise earnings analysis.

Now we have another former Rockstar developer weighing in to discuss GTA 6's price, with previous technical director Obbe Vermeij sharing that he doesn't believe Rockstar will charge $100 for the new game. That being said, GTA 6 is seen as one of the most expensive video games to produce in history with an estimated budget of $2 billion, and Vermeij believes Rockstar will heavily use AI in the production of the game in a bid to reduce costs and automate some of the more tedious tasks.

In a recent interview with GamesHub, Vermeij shared some very in-depth thoughts about how Rockstar could be using artificial intelligence to help with GTA 6's development while also touching upon some of the core aspects of the studio's business:

Do you think GTA VI is going to be the game that makes the $100 release a reality?

Rockstar haven't said anything about $100. This is just something that the internet has decided.

I think that they probably won't do that because, although they haven't said anything about it either, they will have a GTA VI online component and they'll be thinking we want the biggest user base we can possibly have.

Rather than trying to cash in that extra $30, I think they're just going to make it a regular priced game and then make the money on the back-end in the years to come.

But the price of development is just kind of out of control. My theory is that GTA VI will be the most expensive game ever developed and it will remain that way because AI is going to take up a lot of the monotonous work that artists have to do.

The main component of cost is artists. That's maybe 70% of the cost of a game. But they spend a lot of time rigging animation skeletons, fixing holes in the collision mesh, and making a low LOD version of the mesh. All these things are very repetitive, even building alleyways, which are basically the same again, and interiors.

I think more of that work will be done by AI and procedural generation, things that maybe aren't AI, but a set of rules that creates assets. Animated cutscenes as well. Motion capture for like 40-50 people for a crowd is very expensive. There's really no reason why AI couldn't do that.

As AI is used in more tools, animation packages, rendering packages and compilers, individual people will become more productive and therefore you won't need quite so many people to make a game, and I think that's going to be great because if games are cheaper then publishers will be more likely to take risks and try different themes and maybe target niches rather than just trying to make every game suitable for every potential player.

I think it's a positive move and I think there's a lot of jobs that are just tedious in game development now and it just doesn't make sense. I think there's 1,500 people working on GTA VI but there are a hundred or two hundred who are the creative people behind it. They do the interesting work and there's a lot of people just doing the monotonous work.

I think games in the future will be faster to make and hopefully a little cheaper and that becomes more interesting.