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this has been going around gaming sites and spanish news outlets since the netflix extended look dropped, figured i'd throw a thread up since a good chunk of us are probably gonna be part of the problem.
so the claim is basically this. a professor in barcelona, jose montalvo (econ professor at pompeu fabra), is getting credited with saying gta 6 launch day, thursday nov 19, could cost the us economy something like $1 billion. spanish outlets had it first then it spread over to english gaming sites the past couple days.
The math is honestly pretty simple, almost too simple ngl. it is roughly 1.5 million people calling out sick or skipping class, multiplied by a rough average of what a us worker contributes to gdp in a year (around 70k), scaled down to just one day. so it's really one guy's napkin math, not some peer reviewed study or an actual government number. nobody's published a full methodology either, it just got repeated by enough outlets that it started sounding official somewhere along the way
group they keep pointing at is young guys, like 18 to 30, and tech workers specifically, since wfh makes it way easier to just quietly not be at your desk that day. apparently something similar happened with gta v back in 2013 too, some surveys had like 2 to 6% of 18-35 year olds in places like la and nyc skipping work that week.
also kinda funny that take two themselves are expecting close to that same $1b in day one sales lol so it's less the economy loses a billion and more a billion dollars just changes hands really fast nov 19 is a thursday btw. anyone already put in for the day off.
gamefragger
