‘Grand Theft Auto Flu’: is the whole world really taking the day off work to play GTA VI?
Headlines have claimed the release of the first new GTA game in 13 years will hugely affect the global economy on Thursday – but there’s another story that’s been left behind
A new pandemic is threatening planet Earth. It’s scheduled to hit 19 November. Entire offices and worksites will be emptied; employees struck down by a mysterious illness. But you need not panic: it isn’t fatal. It should pass in a few days.
The anticipation for Grand Theft Auto VI, the first new game in the franchise in 13 years, is so high that a steady stream of news coverage has suggested it heralds economic catastrophe due to workers taking time off to play the game. The term “GTA Flu” was coined for the swathe of sickies that reportedly happened when GTA V was released in 2013, and – supposedly – are set to happen again when GTA VI comes out this week.
GTA VI may be the most anticipated game in history. Some predictions put total sales at 40m copies in its first three months, which would generate US$3bn in revenue. GTA Vset the precedent: it wasthe bestselling game of the past decade in the US, and reached US$1bn in sales faster than any entertainment product in history. GTA VI is predicted to break the latter record with ease.
But will so many people take time off that – as various viral headlines have claimed – the game will cause a $1bn dent to the US economy? In April, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, publisher of GTA VI, joked “a lot of people will be calling in sick on November 19”. It made for great headlines – and several agreed.
“A game could grind Australia’s productivity to a AU$70m halt,” bellowed Australia’s Nine News – citing a “PR expert”. “Aussie workplaces prepare for spike in sickies”, proclaimed 7 News a day later. News.com.au predicted 19 November would be the “biggest sick day in history”. The UK’s Daily Star cited an HR company that claimed 1.2 million British workers would take annual leave to play GTA VI, while a broadband comparison service said that number was actually as high as 2.5 million, including 900,000 Britons pretending to be sick (based on a survey of 1,000 people). One “global AI employment platform” claimed annual leave requests for 19 November were up 29% worldwide on last year – a claim based solely on their own users, and repeated by media – whereas a German games publication predicted GTA VI would “paralyze the working world”.
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Even Australia’s Fair Work Ombudsman weighed in, taking to Instagram to explain when it’s OK to take unpaid leave (note: never for a video game) and reminding workers that employers can ask for evidence if you call in sick for even one day.
So is an outbreak of GTA Flu actually likely? It’s not unusual for people to take time off for a cultural moment of this magnitude. While it is, perhaps, more common for people to take a single sickie to see a highly anticipated film, a game of GTA VI’s size requires a chunk of time; on Reddit and Instagram, stories abound of people having booked weeks of leave.
“Data suggests that there will be a spike in absenteeism,” says Jacqueline Burgess, a business and game studies researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast, citing claims from a human re
“People are going to take off work for it, but that’s not unique to this game,” says Daniel Joseph, digital sociologist at Manchester University. Other games, like Call of Duty, drag people away from their office desks too. In Japan, the Dragon Quest series moved its release day from midweek to a Saturday in the 1990s because children were skipping school and employees were calling in sick just to play.
Will the purported absenteeism on Thursday translate to an impact on productivity? That’s harder to discern, but it seems unlikely.
One prediction of a $1bn blow to US productivity has been repeated ad nauseam by press outlets, content creators and Instagram pages. The figure originates from an article published by a Spanish broadcaster in July 2025, which quotes José García-Montalvo, a professor of economics at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. But the figures appear to correspond to some back-of-the-napkin math, rather than any hard data analysis; Montalvo did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The estimates cited by 7News were based on shift-work data in a workforce management platform. That company claimed to look at tentpole video game releases, such as Baldur’s Gate 3,to see if absenteeism increased around their launch. The data suggested it did, with the platform predicting “very likely carnage” for Australian workplaces, owing to GTA VI’s midweek release.
Though the cultural cachet and impact of GTA is immense – it’s one of the few titles to be fully embraced in mainstream coverage, whether for its impressive scope, sales, or controversy – under the surface, GTA Flu appears to be just another wheel of the marketing machine, a headline-phenomenon driven by media companies fumbling to cover an industry they largely ignore.
However, there is a real employment story involving GTA VI that has been left behind. In October, Rockstar Games dismissed 34 employees in the UK and Canada, in a move described by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as a “blatant and ruthless act of union busting”; all the UK employees were union members. Rockstar Games alleged the employees had leaked confidential information. PJ Sim, Rockstar’s Communications Director in ANZ, declined to comment for this story.
Will Mesilane, an Australian developer who worked on GTA VI for two years, was one of the affected employees at Rockstar’s Edinburgh office. He has a lot of complex feelings as GTA VI’s launch approaches, and flip-flops on whether he will play the completed game at all. His dismissal, which he believes was unlawful, dramatically affected his life. He was on a skilled worker visa in the UK; when he was dismissed, his partner was forced to quit her job so the pair could relocate to Australia.
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“A two-minute phone call caused devastation to our lives that is still ongoing more than a full year later,” he says.
The Rockstar employees’ case is before the Glasgow employment tribunal, with closing submissions scheduled for 17 and 18 November. The timing is particularly pertinent: it falls the day before the biggest video game in the world is released. While millions wait for GTA VI to drop, Mesilane and his colleagues will be “waiting with bated breath” for the ruling.
“I have always held the belief since day one that the dismissals were due to our involvement with the IWGB,” he says. “I remain hopeful that when all is said and done we will receive the justice we think we truly deserve.”
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