GTA 6 Sick Days Probably Won't Cost the Economy $1 Billion, Economist Says

Plenty of people are already planning to skip work on November 19, the day Grand Theft Auto VI comes out. One widely shared estimate says all those sick days could cost the US economy $1 billion in a single day. An economist who studies big events told Fortune that the number probably doesn't hold up, and that it wouldn't matter much even if it did (Fortune).

Where did the $1 billion GTA 6 number come from?

Fortune traces it to José García Montalvo, an economist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and says the International Business Times helped spread it. MercoPress points out that the figure doesn't come from a published study. It has also been floating around for most of the past year. Montalvo didn't respond to Fortune's request for comment.

The time-off spike itself looks real, though. BambooHR, which makes HR software, told Money that requests for November 19 are running 9% to 17% above a typical third Thursday in November. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick saw this coming back in April, when he predicted that "a lot of people will be calling in sick on November 19."

Why do economists think the GTA 6 sick days won't matter?

Victor Matheson is an economist at the College of the Holy Cross. He says people are mostly just moving their days off around. Somebody who burns a PTO day on launch day just won't have it to use in February or July. "It's not like people are going to take more days off than in the past because of this," he told Fortune. "They're just changing when those days are getting taken off."

He also put the number in perspective. By his math, $1 billion works out to roughly 1% of one day of US output, which he called "pretty tiny in the big picture." He made a case for happiness, too. "Ultimately we want to be producing the maximum amount of happiness, not necessarily the maximum number of widgets," he said.

Matheson compared it to March Madness, which runs for weeks. A game launch is one day, and he doesn't expect many people to take weeks off for it.

Is GTA 6 still coming out on November 19?

As of this morning, yes. Rockstar dropped the launch trailer on October 15, and the game arrives on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19 (we broke the trailer down here).

My read is that most of these "sick days" were always going to be vacation days with better timing. Nobody is getting extra hours out of this, and the people taking the day were going to spend it on something fun eventually (Leonida just happens to be the something, and if your boss asks, it was the flu).

More gaming news is right here.

Header image is official Grand Theft Auto VI art from Rockstar Games.