When the long awaited role playing game “Fallout 4” dropped in 2015, it marked the first installation in the franchise in five years. The release quickly became a running joke, with working class gamers yukking it up over their plans to call in sick the day it hit store shelves, and the game’s developer even issuing a bogus doctor’s note.
Now history seems to be repeating itself — and this time for almost certainly the most hyped game ever, making its release an actual liability for economy-wide productivity.
Enter “Grand Theft Auto VI,” the first installation in the beloved GTA franchise in 13 years. With nearly 5 million pre-orders worldwide, the game’s release on November 19 is poised to take a sizable chunk of the working population with it, a phenomenon tantamount to an unofficial holiday, as the Wall Street Journal tells it.
“We’ve got a couple of days where we’re like, ‘daddy’s very busy,’” Bud Burruss, a software engineer and father of three told the WSJ. When the game drops, Burruss said he plans on taking five whole days to himself.
“I’m not going to be playing it for, like, 20 hours straight like an absentee father,” the software engineer explained. “But right out of the gate we’re going hard. I’ll have the cave door shut.”
“It has been rescheduled so many times that I’m like, you know what, if we are for sure doing this on Nov 19, I’m taking Thursday to Thursday off,” medical sales rep Anna Ray told the WSJ.
What the overall hit to workplace productivity looks like remains to be seen, but given the astronomical hype around GTA VI, it sure won’t be zero. While there are the immediate lost work-hours to consider, there’s also the long-term effect to workplace productivity to consider even after gamers return to work.
According to one analysis based on a survey of 2,000 gamers, late-night gaming sessions contribute to a two-hour drop in the next day’s productivity on average.
On the other hand, given that we live in a time of record corporate profits amidst brutally sluggish wages, maybe the least managers can do is let their faithful workers enjoy a day or five of uninterrupted gaming bliss.
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