Grand Theft Auto VI comes out on November 19, and people are already finding creative ways to justify the price. The best one so far comes from Mark Tilbury, the British entrepreneur turned finance influencer, who told his Instagram followers that buying the game “actually saves you $5,000.”
The video went viral for the obvious reason. As one commenter put it, “This is the boy maths we’ve been waiting for.” UNILAD Tech ran the numbers and couldn’t get them to work. We had a go too, and the answer is more interesting than “he’s wrong.” Gaming really is one of the cheapest hobbies per hour. The $5,000 just isn’t how that saving works.
The short version
- GTA 6 costs $79.99 for the standard edition and $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition.
- Tilbury’s per-hour math holds up: at 80 hours, the Ultimate Edition works out to $1.25 an hour.
- The $5,000 only appears if you’d otherwise spend $100 every night for 50 nights straight.
- For a more typical person, the real saving is closer to a few hundred dollars, if it’s anything at all.
- Online subscriptions and electricity add a little. A new console changes the math completely.
What Tilbury actually said
His pitch has three steps. First, the cost per hour: “If it takes you 80 hours to complete, that’s $1.25 per hour of fun. But once you add in side missions and explore the map, it’s down to 50 cents an hour.” Second, the time: “Now let’s say you play for four hours every evening, that’s 50 nights of entertainment.” Third, the comparison: “Compare that to going out, where you could easily spend $100 in a single night. That’s why buying GTA 6 actually saves you $5,000.”
Steps one and two are fine. The 50 cents figure assumes 200 hours of play, which is exactly 50 nights at four hours each, so the numbers are internally consistent. Step three is where the trick is.
The cost per hour holds up
We don’t know how long GTA 6 will take to beat yet. GTA V is a reasonable guide: players on HowLongToBeat report about 31 to 32 hours for the main story, around 48 hours with side content, and roughly 80 hours to do everything. Tilbury’s 80 hour figure lines up with a completionist run of the last game, which is a fair starting point for a bigger sequel.
| Hours played | What that looks like | Standard ($79.99) | Ultimate ($99.99) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 32 | Main story only (GTA V average) | $2.50/hr | $3.12/hr |
| 48 | Story plus side content | $1.67/hr | $2.08/hr |
| 80 | Tilbury’s “complete” figure | $1.00/hr | $1.25/hr |
| 200 | 50 nights at 4 hours | $0.40/hr | $0.50/hr |
| 1,000 | Years of online play | $0.08/hr | $0.10/hr |
That last row isn’t fantasy. One commenter under Tilbury’s video said they’d easily put more than 1,000 hours into GTA V over a decade of GTA Online. With GTA V at roughly 230 million copies sold, according to Take-Two, plenty of players are in that club.
Against almost anything you’d do outside the house, games win on cost per hour by a mile. Even a movie, which is cheap as nights out go, costs several times more per hour than a big game you actually finish. That’s the real point buried in Tilbury’s video, and it’s a good one.
Where the $5,000 comes from
The $5,000 figure is 50 nights multiplied by $100. For it to be a real saving, three things all have to be true: you’d otherwise go out every single night for seven weeks straight, you’d spend $100 every time, and GTA 6 fully replaces those nights rather than filling evenings you’d have spent at home anyway. He also doesn’t subtract the $100 the game costs, though that’s the least of the problems.
UNILAD tried a gentler version: going out once a week and spending $60 each time adds up to $3,120 over a full year. That’s a fair yearly budget, but it assumes GTA 6 replaces a whole year of weekends.
Tilbury: 50 nights x $100 ……………. = $5,000 “saved”
UNILAD: 52 weeks x $60 ……………… = $3,120 “saved”
Ours: 7 weekends x $60 ……………. = $420
minus Ultimate Edition ………. – $100
———————————————
realistic saving ……………. ≈ $320
Our version assumes you binge the game for about seven weeks, the same 200 hours Tilbury uses, and that it replaces one $60 night out each weekend in that time. That comes to roughly $320 back in your pocket. Not life-changing, but not nothing, and a lot more honest than $5,000.
The costs he left out
A few line items don’t show up in the viral version. None of them breaks the argument, but they’re worth knowing:
- Online subscriptions. Playing online on PS5 requires PlayStation Plus, which starts at $79.99 a year for the Essential tier. Xbox requires a Game Pass membership for online multiplayer. If you only play story mode, you can skip this.
- Electricity. A PS5 draws around 200 watts while gaming, plus whatever your TV uses. At around 18 cents per kilowatt-hour, 200 hours of play costs very roughly $10 to $12.
- Storage. The download is reported at around 210GB. If your console is full, a storage upgrade can cost more than the game. We broke down what GTA 6’s file size means for your drive.
- The console. If you don’t own a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S yet, all of this goes out the window. GTA 6 is console-only at launch, with no PC version announced.
- In-game spending. GTA Online has made Take-Two billions through Shark Cards. If GTA 6’s online mode follows the same path, your cost per hour can go up as easily as down.
Is Tilbury giving financial advice?
Probably not, and he likely knows it. Tilbury built and sold businesses in the UK before building an audience of millions on TikTok and Instagram with simple, punchy money explainers. This video reads more like a fun bit timed for GTA hype than a budget plan, and the comments treated it that way. “How I be convincing myself to buy GTA 6,” wrote one person.
Preloading opens on November 12, a week before launch. Whether you count that as saving money or spending it is between you and your bank account.
Sources and further reading
- UNILAD Tech: Self-made millionaire explains how playing GTA 6 could save you $5,000
- Game Developer: Grand Theft Auto 6’s $80 price settles the $100 question
- HowLongToBeat: Grand Theft Auto V
- Simulation Daily: Take-Two results and GTA V sales
- Rockstar Games: Grand Theft Auto VI
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