1.5 million Americans plan to skip work for GTA 6, and it could cost a billion dollars
An economist has put a number on the launch day sickie. Read the caveat before you repeat the headline.
An estimate doing the rounds this week puts the cost of Grand Theft Auto 6's launch day to US businesses at close to one billion dollars, on the basis that around 1.5 million Americans will not be at work on 19 November.
The figure was first reported by the Spanish outlet El Output. The estimate implies roughly a 2% short-term dip in productivity, concentrated among men aged 18 to 30, with the technology sector expected to take the largest share.
José García Montalvo
Professor of Economics, Pompeu Fabra University
The caveat, before the fun part
This is an academic estimate, not a government forecast, and no full methodology has been published. That matters more than it usually would, because a number like this is built from assumptions that are impossible to check: how many people take the day, what they would otherwise have produced, and how much of that output is genuinely lost rather than shifted to the following Monday.
Productivity-loss figures for cultural events have a long history of being generated, quoted, and then quietly never revisited. The March Madness version of this number has been recycled every year for two decades.
So: interesting, plausible in shape, and not a measurement.
Why the shape of it is right
The direction is not in doubt even if the decimal places are.
Rockstar chose a Thursday. That is not an accident: it gives a launch day and then a weekend, which is the single best configuration for a game people want to disappear into. It also makes taking one day off worth four days of playing.
Grand Theft Auto V made its first billion dollars in three days in 2013. This game is arriving into a much larger install base, at a higher price, after a twelve-year wait, with a cultural footprint that has grown rather than faded in the gap.
The joke inside the number
A billion dollars of lost American productivity is, roughly, the amount Grand Theft Auto V took in its opening three days. If Grand Theft Auto 6 matches that, the same population will have handed Rockstar in sales approximately what it costs their employers in absence.
That is not economics. It is just a pleasing symmetry.
What to actually take from it
If you manage people and any of them are between 18 and 30, assume Thursday 19 November is a busy day for annual leave requests, and that the ones who did not ask will be unwell. Booking it now is the honest move and considerably cheaper than a Friday spent pretending.
Sources
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