A finance YouTuber has done the math and decided Grand Theft Auto VI is, contrary to popular belief, a money-saver. Mark Tilbury, the self-made millionaire with 9.3 million subscribers on the popular streaming platform, posted a 30-second video arguing that buying the game saves you $5,000. His reasoning is cheeky, but the numbers almost hold up.
Tilbury starts with the GTA 6 Ultimate Edition at $99.99. At 80 hours for the main story, he says, the game costs $1.25 an hour. When you add side missions and exploration, it rounds out to around 200 hours and the cost drops to 50 cents an hour. Play four hours a night and you get 50 evenings of entertainment. Compared to a single night out, he figures, that can easily run 100 dollars, so 50 of them would cost $5,000.
So, basically, by staying in and enjoying Vice City, you could avoid $5,000 in hypothetical nights out, before deducting the game and other costs.
The bit is, obviously, purely value-for-money comedy that works best if you ignore a few things. His 30-second video uses the pricier Ultimate Edition, not the $79.99 Standard Edition. It also assumes you would have spent $100 every one of those 50 nights. Finally, it skips the console, the electricity and the fact that GTA 6's real length is not confirmed yet.
Tilbury's point flips if you look at the real cost, because the game is only the start. If you need a console to play on, our full price breakdown puts the real bill anywhere from about $80 to a thousand, depending on whether you already own a PS5 or Xbox.
The extras pile up from there. Sony is selling limited Vice City DualSense controllers at around $84.99, while Rockstar Games has opened an official merch collection of hoodies and tees. Go all in and buying everything Rockstar is selling runs into the thousands. Even the physical poster at the Rockstar Store is $.99, though the printable Leonida map is free.
What GTA 6 and its world really cost
Item | Price |
|---|---|
Standard Edition | $79.99 |
Ultimate Edition | $99.99 |
A new console, if you need one | About $500 to $1,000 |
Limited GTA 6 DualSense controller | Around $84.99 |
Official merch collection | Hoodies and tees, sold separately |
Everything in the Rockstar Store | Into the hundreds |
Physical double-sided poster | $0.99, or free with a purchase |
Printable Leonida map and poster | Free |
Tilbury says the game saves you 5,000 dollars, but the full GTA 6 bill climbs fast.
The price of GTA 6 has been a story of its own for years. The game pushed past the old price ceiling that most releases held to for years and analysts still expect it to make billions anyway. Consoles got pricier too, after Sony's global PS5 price increase ahead of launch. One analyst even reckons the game could cost the US economy a billion dollars in a single day in lost productivity. Against all that, Tilbury's 50-cents-an-hour math is the cheeriest cost figure anyone has put on this game.
Tilbury is half-joking, but there is a real point buried in the gag. A game you sink 200 hours into is some of the cheapest entertainment going, far cheaper than almost any night out. The catch is everything bolted onto it, the console, the controller, the hoodie and the collector's clutter, which is where the bill balloons.
With that said, there's real money to be made in GTA 6 when you think about all the content creators who are planning their content around the game, including but not limited to the Vanoss Crew and Kai Cenat.