GTA Online is making Rockstar £1,000,000 every single day reveals hacked info

Red Dead Online hasn’t been anywhere near as lucrative (Rockstar/Metro)

As promised, the hackers who attacked Rockstar Games have posted financial and player data for GTA Online, after failing to secure a ransom.

On Monday, hacker group ShinyHunters announced it had successfully attacked Rockstar Games and threatened to leak whatever information it stole unless it was paid a ransom by Tuesday, April 14.

Rockstar acknowledged it had been hacked but downplayed the severity of the situation, which suggested that nothing relating to GTA 6 or personal info had been taken. It was also implied, but not outright stated, that Rockstar would not capitulate to the hackers’ demands.

It seems the hackers quickly realised they weren’t getting any money, because they published the stolen data last night, ahead of their deadline, making a lot of once private financial info about GTA Online and Red Dead Online public.

GTA Online’s status as a huge money maker for Rockstar is already well-known. As the online multiplayer mode for GTA 5, its constant updates over the past 13 years have been a key factor in its longevity and why GTA 5 has sold more than 220 million copies.

Even so, it’s still shocking to see actual spending figures. The leaked data has been shared and compiled across the internet, including the GTA Forums, and shows that between the months of September 2025 and April 2026, GTA Online made an average of $9,592,109 (£7,089,480) every week.

GTA Online primarily makes its money by selling Shark cards, which give you virtual currency to spend on in-game items, and GTA+ memberships, which includes extra benefits such as monthly cash deposits.

Of that average $9,592,109, 74% of it came from the Shark cards, with the other 26% coming from GTA+ memberships. Altogether, this means players have been spending $1,319,322 (about £974,983) every day.

GTA Online’s average active player count is a sizeable 9,937,747, but the average number of paying players is said to be 393,402. This means only about 4% of the player base is actually spending any money, which is normal for most live service games.

Clearly, 4% of 10 million people is still a lot and based on the figures, they’re obviously high spenders – which is why the industry refers to them as whales. Overall, it means GTA Online is making $498.8 million (about £386.61 million) every year.

By comparison, Red Dead Online has only been earning an average $26.4 million (£19.51 million) every year, but then Rockstar stopped rolling out major updates in 2022, when it shifted its priorities to GTA 6. It might be less than GTA Online but it’s still an awful lot compared to many other online titles.

Elsewhere, player figures also show that PlayStation is by far the most popular platform for GTA Online, with 3,474,021 weekly active players on PlayStation 5 and 1,889,729 weekly active players on PlayStation 4.

There are 1,129,023 weekly active players on Xbox Series X/S and 1,026,695 weekly active players on Xbox One, which means both are being beaten by the PlayStation 4.

PC is the least popular platform at only 894,621 weekly active players and thus is also making the least amount of money at $264,273 (about £195,298) every week, which demonstrates why Rockstar isn’t prioritising a PC release for GTA 6.

Granted, all these figures are alleged and not officially confirmed by Rockstar or parent company Take-Two Interactive, but while they’ve confirmed the hack is real they’ll never verify the leaked numbers.

As suspected, there’s also no info related to GTA 6, meaning the game remains shrouded in mystery until Rockstar itself officially shares a new update.

Will GTA 6 ever be as big a money maker as GTA 5? (Rockstar Games)

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