By The headline “GTA 6 launch day will cost the US a billion dollars” has been everywhere. I went to check — and it turns out the figure has two parts that hold up very differently.
The billion is a real calculation. Economist José García Montalvo of Pompeu Fabra University worked it out: if people skip work en masse on November 19, US productivity dips about 2% for the day, which in money is a little over a billion. The portrait of the absentee is believable too: men 18 to 30, mostly in tech. Checks out against my colleagues.
The “1.5 million Americans taking the day off”, though, is a number without a source. It shows up in almost every retelling, but the trail leads nowhere: the productivity estimate was first published by Cadena SER in 2025, and the 1.5 million got glued on somewhere along the way. We couldn’t find a source, so we’re not passing it off as fact.
What’s certain: Rockstar picked a Thursday on purpose, so the weekend takes the first wave. And the fact that employers are seriously discussing how many people won’t show up because of a game says more about the scale than any billion. November 19 will be a quiet day in a lot of offices. Ours too.