We’re now seven days away from Grand Theft Auto V stealing away all your time with its 100 hours of gameplay, but on the business side of things, Scottish newspaper The Scotsman is reporting that the development and marketing budget for GTA V is £170 million (about $266 million).
Brian Baglow, who previously worked at Rockstar and is the Founder of Scottish Games Network, talked about Grand Theft Auto:
By any sort of commercial scale, Grand Theft Auto is easily Scotland’s largest cultural export ever. The series has sold something like 135 million copies so far. It’s coming up to 17 years since GTA began and it’s become something I don’t think anyone involved with the original game would have expected.
The series has come on not just in leaps and bounds, but in long jumps since then. It’s become far more than the sum of its parts, it’s a fully global phenomenon. This is the fifth major release, and the nice thing is that all of them have been made here in Scotland.
Baglow also tackled the controversy that always surrounds the GTA series:
For many people in power globally, GTA is just a great big red flashing light because it’s perceived as something bad and violent, defined by tabloid hysteria. But if the series was just about gratuitous violence, it would not have achieved the sales and success it has.
It is a massive cultural and creative success. It’s arguably bigger than the next Star Wars film, and the games industry has been behind GTA from the get-go. I’d really like to see the UK government acknowledge the fact one of the biggest entertainment franchises in the world was made here.
Now, if The Scotsman is correct in their reporting, it would mean that Grand Theft Auto V has a higher budget than Grand Theft Auto IV and many other games, which you can see in this graph by WCCFTech:
Will you be lining up at midnight for Grand Theft Auto V next week? Let us know in the comments below.
