Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick calls Grand Theft Auto 6's $1 to $1.5 billion budget a competitive weapon, creating a moat that virtually makes the franchise impossible to compete against.
Most frame the $1 to $1.5 billion development cost of the next Grand Theft Auto as a gamble, and rightfully so, not every publisher can afford to spend the time and money Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games have on Grand Theft Auto 6. However, if you ask Strauss Zelnick, it's less of a risk and more of a weapon.
Standing in front of a Wall Street audience at the TD Cowen 54th Annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference on May 27, 2026, the longtime Take-Two executive described massive AAA development costs as "an advantage and an entry barrier," arguing that the staggering expense of making the "best entertainment on earth" is what prevents anyone else from entering the space.
Then he went further. Asked whether AI or other tools could allow competitors to replicate what Rockstar builds, Zelnick had this to say:
The folks at Rockstar seem to be able to make these massive hits, and lots of other people have tried. Lots and lots, including former Rockstar employees. And so far, they haven't been able to do it.
He did not name anyone. He did not have to. Everyone knew who who he was referring to, and, well, why.
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Leslie Benzies was the president of Rockstar North for over a decade. He was the lead producer on Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Grand Theft Auto V. He left Rockstar in 2016 after a legal dispute with Take-Two over $150 million in unpaid royalties. Eventually, he founded a studio called Build a Rocket Boy and spent nearly a decade building an open-world game called MindsEye that was supposed to prove he could do it without Rockstar. The game launched in late 2025 to some of the worst reviews of the year, proving that Rockstar's biggest strength didn't come from a single individual, even if that person may partly be responsible for the empire that it has become today.
Basically, the takeaway here is if Benzies cannot do it, nobody can, including AI.
Every studio that has attempted to compete with Grand Theft Auto in the open-world space has either failed outright (MindsEye, Saints Row), nearly collapsed (Cyberpunk 2077), or achieved only moderate, declining success (The Division). The common factor is not a lack of talent. CD Projekt Red is extraordinarily talented. Benzies has more GTA experience than anyone outside Rockstar. Volition had decades of open-world expertise. The common factor is that none of them had the financial infrastructure to sustain the development cost required to compete at Rockstar's level over the timeline Rockstar's standards demand.
This is the GTA moat. Zelnick is explicitly saying that the cost of entry into the open-world AAA space is now so prohibitively high that potential competitors cannot clear the bar. To build a GTA-class game in 2026, a studio would need to spend $1 billion or more over seven to ten years with no revenue from the project during that period. The only way to fund that is with a portfolio of live-service titles generating hundreds of millions in annual recurring revenue.
Take-Two has that portfolio: Grand Theft Auto Online at $500 million per year, NBA 2K at hundreds of millions more, and Zynga mobile providing a stable cash flow base. The development budget for GTA 6 was funded by the revenue from Grand Theft Auto V and GTA Online. The revenue from GTA 6 will fund whatever comes next.
Take-Two Financial Infrastructure
| Revenue Source | Annual Revenue (Estimated) | Role in the Moat |
|---|---|---|
GTA Online | ~$500M/year | Primary funding engine for Rockstar's development cycle |
NBA 2K franchise | ~$1.5B+/year (including VC microtransactions) | Largest single revenue generator in Take-Two's portfolio |
Zynga mobile portfolio | ~$1.5B+/year | Stable cash flow base; absorbs quarterly volatility |
GTA V base game sales (ongoing) | ~$200M+/year (at 225M lifetime) | Residual sales continue 13 years post-launch |
Total Take-Two FY2026 net bookings | $6.72B | The financial base that funds $1B+ single-product development |
This is the financial infrastructure that makes the moat possible.
Elden Ring was built for a fraction of GTA 6's budget and sold 28 million copies in its first year. Baldur's Gate 3 was developed by a mid-sized studio and won Game of the Year. Hades, Celeste, and Hollow Knight prove that extraordinary games can emerge from budgets that would not cover a month of GTA 6 development. The moat only applies to the specific category of open-world, systems-driven, multiplayer-enabled AAA experiences with decade-long live-service tails. It does not apply to action RPGs, indie games, narrative adventures, or any other genre where creative vision outweighs production scale.
Then again, Zelnick was never talking about the video game industry. He is talking about GTA specifically and you can't deny that he's right. Nobody can compete with GTA 6 right now. Nobody has the money. Nobody has the infrastructure. Nobody has the live-service revenue to fund the development cycle, and the one person who had more institutional knowledge about building GTA games than almost anyone alive tried for nearly a decade and produced something that couldn't even compete with the worst Rockstar outing.
The budget is not the gamble. The budget is the wall. GTA 6, launching on November 19 with $8 billion in SEC-filed revenue guidance behind it, is the product that makes the wall higher for everyone who comes after.