MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Specialist outlets estimate GTA VI absenteeism could cost the US a billion dollars

The game is being developed at Rockstar North, the company's Edinburgh base, where some 900 people work, though around 4,000 employees across all the group's studios have contributed to the project

Video game and technology outlets estimate that the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI, scheduled for November 19, could cost the United States economy more than a billion dollars in lost productivity, due to the number of workers expected to skip work to play. The estimate has circulated within the sector's digital ecosystem since last year and does not come from a published study.

The most specific attribution is to José García Montalvo, professor of economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, cited by the Spanish outlet eloutput, according to whom the first day alone could generate losses close to that figure through absenteeism. The calculation reproduced by those outlets assumes around one and a half million people take a working day off and multiplies that by the average annual contribution of a US worker to gross domestic product, some 70,000 dollars. No consultancy has published a full methodology.

There are precedents measured more rigorously. The firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas put lost productivity on the Monday after the Super Bowl at more than 4 billion dollars, based on a Workforce Institute survey of 1,107 adults. Within gaming, launches such as Halo 3 in 2007 produced an equivalent phenomenon, dubbed at the time the “Halo Holiday”. Several companies subsequently moved their releases to Fridays to soften the effect.

The scale of the phenomenon has grounding in the franchise's record. Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, has sold 230 million copies and taken close to 10 billion dollars, making it the highest-grossing cultural product in history.

The game is being developed at Rockstar North, the company's Edinburgh base, where some 900 people work, though around 4,000 employees across all the group's studios have contributed to the project. The action takes place in Vice City, within the fictional state of Leonida, a distorted version of Florida, and players control two protagonists: Jason Duval, a former soldier, and Lucía Caminos, of Hispanic origin. Immigration in the United States is among the themes it addresses.

“I hope we meet as many of the expectations as people have of it,” Rob Nelson, development director and co-head of Rockstar North, told the newspaper El País, the only Spanish-language outlet invited to a pre-release demonstration.

The standard edition will cost 79.99 dollars and the Ultimate edition 99.99. The game will be sold in digital format only, a decision criticised by collectors that coincides with Sony's announcement that it will stop releasing titles on physical media in 2028.