1.5 million people planning a sick day for GTA 6 in the US alone

The launch of GTA 6 will earn Rockstar Games hundreds of millions of dollars, but it could cost ordinary firms over $1 billion, because of people taking a sickie to play it.

There’s an urban myth that Square Enix is prohibited by Japanese law, from releasing a new Dragon Quest game on a weekday, because schoolkids kept bunking off school to play each new sequel. That’s not actually true, although after Dragon Quest 3 saw hundreds of kids being arrested for truancy, the date was moved to a Saturday for every game until 2012.

US business owners may wish there was an actual law stopping GTA 6 from being released on November 19, because that’s a Thursday and millions of people are sorely tempted to take the day off sick and enjoy a long weekend of GTA indulgence.

You may well be planning something similar yourself, for which we do not judge you, but an analyst has calculated that around 1.5 million people intend to call in sick on the day of launch in the US, costing American businesses up to $1 billion (£750 million) in lost revenue.

The figures are only for the US, despite the numbers having been calculated by Professor José García Montalvo at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, so there’s no knowing what the worldwide figure might be.

According to his calculations, as reported by the International Business Times, the USA will see a drop in productivity of around 2% on launch day, purely due to people taking time to play the game (no doubt some have also taken time off officially).

Unsurprisingly, the most likely to take time off by pretending to be ill are men aged 18 to 30, with technology workers being the most enthusiastic single group. Although even those that do turn up to work on time are expected to be very distracted by the launch.

For those that have been following the game, none of this is very surprising, especially as 6% of workers aged 18 to 35, in major cities in the US, took time off to play GTA 5 when it launched in 2013.

The irony is that $1 billion is almost exactly what Rockstar, and owner Take-Two Interactive, expect to make from the game on launch day, with some estimates suggesting up to $4.5 billion (£3.36 billion) in the first seven days.

There is no official indication of what the budget for GTA 6 is, but rumours have ranged from $1 billion to more than $3 billion. With the game’s revenues likely to outstrip even the highest end estimates with a week, GTA 6 is set to not only be the biggest video game release of all-time but also the most profitable.

GTA 5 is currently the best-selling traditional video game ever made, by a considerable margin, with over 230 million copies sold and an estimated $10 billion in revenues. GTA 6 is predicted to eclipse that relatively quickly, especially once the inevitable PC version and online component are announced – which is widely expected to happen early next year.

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