GTA Online's Kortz Center Heist is live, and you need a mansion to start it

GTA Online's summer update landed early Tuesday morning. The Kortz Center Heist, Title Update 1.73, is live on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and it is almost certainly the last piece of story content GTA Online gets before Grand Theft Auto VI arrives.

The job itself is an art robbery. You case the Kortz Center, the museum sitting up in Pacific Bluffs, working for a collector named Mr. Faber and his fixer Raf De Angelis. Rockstar's own pitch is that you "meticulously stake out the museum and carefully plot your approach, then snatch the Kortz Center's most valuable exhibits." It is multi-stage, it has different approaches and escape routes, and you can run it solo or with up to four players.

The nice touch is the counterfeiter. Your studio employs a forger who paints replicas of the pieces you steal, so what goes back on the museum wall is a fake.

The free heist has an eight-figure door charge

Rockstar is not charging real money for the update. It is charging in fiction.

To start The Kortz Center Heist you need the new Art Studio expansion, and the Art Studio is bought through the Dynasty 8 Executive site as an add-on to a Mansion. Mansions came in December's A Safehouse in the Hills update and they are the most expensive real estate GTA Online has ever sold:

Fully upgraded, a mansion runs past GTA$17.5 million, per GTABase's property listing. The Art Studio is on top of that.

That is the mechanic, plainly stated: a free content drop whose headline activity is gated behind the priciest property in the game, in a game that sells its currency for real money as Shark Cards. You can grind the money. Plenty of people will. Plenty of others will look at the number and reach for a card.

Rockstar sanded the edges a bit in the run-up. Log into GTA Online before July 13 and you get GTA$500,000 plus a free Benefactor Turreted Limo. Complete any heist, old or new, and you get GTA$1,000,000 and the NOOSE outfit. Players who already owned a mansion and logged in before the 13th get GTA$1,000,000 off the Art Studio itself, a free Annihilator Stealth, a sculpture, and a shot at a unique painting for the house.

Rockstar has not published the heist's payout.

GTA+ gets the car first

The new Grotti Veleno GT goes to GTA+ subscribers free from the Vinewood Car Club starting today, a week before anyone else can buy it. That is the same early-access pattern the subscription has run for years, so nobody should be shocked, but it is worth naming: the flashiest new toy in the update is behind the monthly fee for its first week.

The update also brings additions to the Rockstar Mission Creator and a batch of gameplay changes. The full patch notes are still rolling out.

The last one

GTA Online turns 13 this fall. It has outlived two console generations and a lot of the people who built it. Whatever you think of Shark Cards and the drip-feed, the studio is closing out a 13-year live game with a proper heist and a story beat rather than letting it go quiet, and the servers are not being switched off. That is a better ending than most live-service games get.

Whether it is worth GTA$11.5 million of your time is a different question, and one you can answer for yourself.