Most Expensive Video Games Ever Made by Production Budget
About This Dataset
Most Expensive Video Games Ever Made by Production Budget
Video games ranked by their total estimated development and marketing budget in millions of USD. Modern AAA video game budgets have escalated dramatically, with several titles exceeding $200 million in combined development and marketing costs — rivalling Hollywood blockbuster productions. AI-assisted data.
Analysis
The top three in Production Budget (Million USD) in 2025 are GTA VI (2,000), Star Citizen (700) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (540). GTA VI and Star Citizen together hold 56.8% of the combined total of all 8 entities. Only 1 of the 8 reaches even half the leader's figure (1,000 or more). It takes the next 4 entities (Star Citizen, Red Dead Redemption 2, Destiny, Cyberpunk 2077) added together to match GTA VI.
Source:
Wikipedia
Key Findings
🏆
GTA VI leads in Production Budget (Million USD) with 2,000 in 2025.
📅
2025 recorded the highest combined total across all categories.
↔️
Gap in 2025: GTA VI is 10× larger than Call of Duty: MW3.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Wikipedia
- Coverage
- 8 entities · 2011–2025 (7 years) · 8 observations
- Measure
- Production Budget (Million USD)
- Last updated
- 6 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Missing years are left empty rather than estimated — no interpolation, no carrying a previous year forward.
- Change is measured between the first and last year in which an entity actually reported a value, so a series that starts late is not penalised for the years before it existed.
- The compound annual rate is (last ÷ first)^(1 ÷ years) − 1, using those same two reported years.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value in 2025.
- An entity that reported nothing in the latest year is still listed — it follows the ranked entities in the table rather than being dropped.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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