Rockstar Games will release Grand Theft Auto VI on November 19, and public estimates put its development cost between $1 billion and $2 billion — a figure that may make it the most expensive entertainment property ever built, and, according to a Fortune commentary, the last blockbuster of its kind.

Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar's parent company, has never disclosed what GTA VI cost to develop. The estimates that circulate publicly — $1 billion to $2 billion — describe a production that took roughly a decade and thousands of artists, programmers, writers and designers working toward a single creative vision across three continents.

The release itself is expected to be a cultural event. Millions of players, most of them men, are expected to call in sick on launch day, descend into their basements and disappear into the game's fictional Vice City. Television news will cover it, newspapers will write about it, Saturday Night Live will parody it. Fortune's columnist expects the game to generate more revenue than almost any entertainment property ever created — and to be a masterpiece.

It will also, the argument runs, be the last of its kind. Not because Rockstar will fail to make another great game, and not because artificial intelligence is already making today's games faster and cheaper — it is. The claim is narrower: GTA VI represents the culmination of a model of creativity that AI is about to upend.

What did scale actually buy?

For more than three decades, ambition in narrative video games has been measured by size. Bigger teams built bigger worlds; larger budgets bought denser cities, longer scripts and more things to do. Rendering a virtual city is a technological challenge. Populating it with ten thousand hand-authored details, on schedule, across three continents, is a feat of creative coordination.

The model carries a structural cost, and the source points to a concrete example. Late in development of Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar cut roughly five hours of content from a game built by some 1,600 people. Five hours is roughly the length of an entire Call of Duty campaign. Creative work requires deletion — it has to be created before anyone can know it does not belong.

Why does AI change the economics?

The bigger the creative team, the harder it becomes to erase, rethink and start again. Every important decision sets hundreds, sometimes thousands, of writers, artists, engineers, animators and audio experts in motion. When the pieces come together, the original idea may no longer work — and abandoning it can mean unwinding hundreds of interconnected decisions across disciplines and production schedules. The later the change, the more expensive it becomes. Creative decisions become financial decisions.

AI lowers the cost of changing your mind. Developers have always prototyped, tested and discarded ideas. What changes is how far an idea can be developed before a studio commits the full weight of production behind it. If a small team can build something playable and expressive enough to assess early, expensive commitments come later, when there is a better sense of what works. As the economics shift, the creative process inverts: less about what can be made, more about what is worth keeping.

Is there a precedent for this shift?

The commentary draws a parallel with painting nearly two centuries ago. When photography arrived, many visual artists feared for their livelihoods, and some were right: the market for commissioned likenesses collapsed. Others asked what they could create instead — freed from faithful representation, they produced Impressionism, Cubism and abstraction.

The author's expectation: cultural historians will one day regard GTA VI the way art historians regard the last great realist painters — the fullest expression of one creative model just before the medium broke open into entirely new forms. The next masterpiece rarely looks like a bigger or cheaper version of the previous one. It looks like something no one thought to make before.

The views expressed are those of the Fortune columnist and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Fortune.