Rockstar Earned Over $1 Million Daily From GTA 5 — Hackers Just Proved It

On April 13, hacking group ShinyHunters published data stolen from Rockstar Games on the dark web, one day ahead of their own ransom deadline. The group exploited Anodot.com, a third-party cloud metrics provider tied to Rockstar's Snowflake infrastructure — not Rockstar's internal servers directly. Rockstar refused to pay, and the files went public.

GTA 5’s average daily revenue between September 2025 and April 2026 is approximately $1.3 million.

"Your Snowflake instances metrics data was compromised thanks to Anodot.com. We do not operate a Telegram channel and this data was never for sale like reported on X (formerly Twitter) for $200k. It is now leaked. How does it feel to be the headline?"

— ShinyHunters

Rockstar Games confirmed the studio suffered a hacker attack on April 11, telling Kotaku only "a limited amount of non-material company information" had been exposed, claiming no "impact on our organization or our players." The company refused further comment once the files were released. Rockstar Games tried to prevent any leaks by refusing to negotiate, but ShinyHunters proceeded regardless.

Rockstar's GTA 5 Profits According to Hacker Leak

GTA Forums user Lexiture reviewed the published files. The data contains no GTA 6 source code, game assets, or player records — strictly financial metrics on GTA Online and Red Dead Online.

PS5 registered 3,474,021 weekly active users and $4,486,346 in weekly bookings. PC produced $264,273 per week from 894,621 active players — lower than every console in the data, including both PS4 and Xbox One.

Between 2014 and 2024, Shark Card sales in GTA 5 Online generated over $5 billion for Rockstar. Shark Cards are purchased with real money and redeemed for in-game currency. During the September 2025 to April 2026 period covered by the leak, roughly 4 percent of GTA Online's active playerbase made any purchase. That narrow slice of paying users drove average weekly revenue of $9.59 million.

Red Dead Online averaged $507,193 per week from June 2024 through March 2026 — approximately one-nineteenth of GTA Online's average over a comparable period. Rockstar halted active Red Dead Online development years before this data was collected. The near-$9 million weekly gap between the two titles explains why.

Isn't This GTA 6 Marketing Beginning?

This leak may have come at a useful moment for Rockstar, and that read is not unfounded. HipHopGamer stated in an interview with PC Gamer that GTA 6 will "produce millionaires" because of a UGC feature we haven’t seen yet. I guess he talks about a system where players build and host servers using native in-game tools — a UGC model where server owners earn a cut of spending on their own content, with Rockstar collecting a platform commission. He emphasized "especially on PC," where mod-server workflows already operate at scale. Rockstar met with Roblox and Fortnite creators, and this suggests that GTA 6 could have a mapmaking tool, because the experience of the latter two is exactly about that.

Rockstar Games has not confirmed any of the leaked figures and declined to comment when contacted by Kotaku after the release. The data is considered authentic by those who reviewed the original files. The numbers Lexiture posted on GTA Forums matched what Kotaku verified independently.

Rockstar starts Grand Theft Auto 6 testing this month, ahead of a November release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S only. The engine for GTA 6 has been developed to operate at a scope that exceeds what the existing GTA Online infrastructure supports. Rockstar has indicated it will continue support of GTA Online after GTA 6 release, keeping both revenue pipelines running simultaneously from launch.

I see the $1.3 million daily figure from GTA 5 Online as direct context for what Rockstar is building into GTA 6 — if a twelve-year-old title generates nearly $500 million annually from less than 5 percent of its playerbase spending, a UGC monetization layer where server owners share in that revenue is not a speculative pitch; it is a tested model with visible financials already behind it.

Read also, all confirmed details on GTA 6 — open world scale, characters, everything visible in the trailers, and what remains unknown before the November release — are collected in one place.