MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Thursday, August 27th 2026 - 21:32 UTC
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.
