The GTA Online casino is now open! People can visit The Diamond Casino & Resort and, after paying a GTA$500 membership fee, can get to gambling. However, people are already finding that this virtual casino can be quite costly. In fact, it’s even already been banned in one country.
First, people can use real money to buy in-game chips. You get 5,000 chips for free after you pay the in-game GTA$500. (That GTA$500 fee also gets you access to the area’s storyline.) You are given 1,000 chips every day you visit. However, given the way GTA Online microtransactions work, you can put real money toward buying these virtual casino chips, then use them on the in-game machines. GTA$1 equals one chip, and $2.99 equals GTA$100,000. That means about $1 is worth around 33,444 chips. However, Rockstar does have a cap in place that limits you to buying 50,000 chips at once and enforces a cooldown before letting you buy more.
Given that this is The Diamond Casino & Resort, chips aren’t the only thing to spend money on. The GTA Online casino also has shops associated with it and it costs GTA$$1,000,000 for a penthouse. (The penthouse is free if you have Twitch Prime and linked your Rockstar Social Club account to it.) While people can’t buy everything, since some clothing is gender-limited and you can’t have every casino style, someone did work out the cost of it all. UnknownModder pointed out on Twitter it would cost GTA$63,548,081 for everything. The highest Shark Card for in-game money sold is the $99.99 Megalodon Shark, and you’d need eight to cover the costs. (Though, at the moment, Steam is selling those cards for $84.99 temporarily.)
As for where you can’t play it, people in South Africa won’t be visiting GTA Online’ s The Diamond Casino & Resort anytime soon. In the country, online gambling is illegal. While this is a game, it is still an online casino where people can spend real money to bet on different kinds of games, it isn’t allowed in that region.