Nearly one in five American workers plan to skip work on November 19 to play Grand Theft Auto VI — and half of them will lie and call in sick, a mass fraud wave the press is treating as a lovable quirk.
BambooHR analyzed data from 3.4 million U.S.-based employees and found 18 percent intend to take Thursday off for the game's launch. Of those, half will simply call in sick rather than request legitimate paid time off. International Business News estimates the sick-out could cost the U.S. economy $1 billion in lost productivity. The New York Post's response was a chuckling headline: "Grand Theft PTO."
The Post framed the story as a cultural moment, quoting Notre Dame professor Matthew Payne: "Of course, folks are going to play hooky on November 19th. Speaking of which, my throat feels a little scratchy." A tenured professor at a Catholic university, joking about workplace fraud to a reporter. Nobody blinked.
Screen Rant, a gaming outlet, buried the worker angle entirely — its coverage focused on Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's comments about potential movie adaptations and the franchise's preorder records. Artvoice focused on a Bloomberg report that GTA Online won't arrive until late 2027, roughly a year after the base game's single-player launch. Neither outlet touched the sick-out story.
The money at stake is staggering. GTA VI has already surpassed $1 billion in presales, with more than 12 million copies sold worldwide according to Sensor Tower. USC professor Dmitri Williams told the Post the game could make $3 billion in its first weeks — comparing that to the lifetime gross of "Avengers: Endgame." Payne added that once multiplayer launches, microtransactions will make the presale numbers "look quaint by comparison."
So the picture is this: Take-Two and Rockstar stand to extract billions from American consumers. Workers plan to defraud their employers to play the game on day one. ISPs like Spectrum and Xfinity are offering free speed boosts to accommodate the download surge. The UK's internet infrastructure already buckled under pre-download traffic, with Virgin Media O2 reporting its busiest broadband day ever. The entire system — employers, infrastructure, the press — is bending to accommodate a mass work-skipping event, and nobody in a position of authority seems willing to call it what it is.
The UK and Canada are seeing the same surge in time-off requests, according to BambooHR. This isn't an American problem. It's a Western problem.
The question isn't whether people want to play a video game. It's whether a culture that celebrates lying to your boss as a folk hero moment still has the work ethic to sustain itself — or whether that erosion is exactly the point.
