BioWare's gone, and the Mass Effect 5 director's first joke was about GTA 6

This week EA shut BioWare and cancelled the next Mass Effect. It's a rough one. BioWare made Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and the Mass Effect trilogy, and VGC notes it comes two months after EA's $55 billion sale to Saudi Arabia's PIF.

Michael Gamble, who'd spent 17 years at the studio and was running the next Mass Effect, posted a thank you to fans and asked anyone with open jobs to get in touch, saying he'd personally vouch for his whole team. Then he ended it like this: "At least I don't have to call in sick when GTA 6 comes out."

It's a dark joke, and a very gamer one. And it lands on a number that's been doing the rounds all week.

That $1 billion sick day figure, again

Dexerto and GamesRadar both ran it on 22 October: about 1.5 million Americans could skip work on 19 November, costing the US roughly $1 billion. It goes back to José García Montalvo, an economist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, by way of International Business Times, and it assumes the people skipping work earn around $70,000 a year.

We covered it back in September, and the same caveat still applies. It's an estimate, not a survey, and nobody's published how the 1.5 million was worked out.

Here's the bit that bugs us. $70,000 a year is about $270 a working day. Multiply that by 1.5 million and you get roughly $400 million, not a billion. You can get closer to a billion by counting each worker's output, which runs higher than their pay, or by assuming people take more than one day off. The version going round doesn't say which it did.

The one person who was definitely right

Take-Two's boss Strauss Zelnick said in April that "a lot of people will be calling in sick on November 19." He sells the game, so he's not exactly neutral, but nobody's arguing with him.

As for Gamble, Amazon's Mass Effect TV show is still being made, and he's still listed as an executive producer on it. So there's that. And he's got 19 November free.