GTA VI probably won’t cost the U.S. economy $1 billion—and economists say it wouldn’t matter if it did

There are a few occasions when requesting time off is warranted: The birth of a child, a much-needed staycation, a once-in-a-lifetime concert.

Maybe you’ve exaggerated being sick to enjoy some time at the beach or a last-minute museum day.

Or maybe you’ve skipped work to play the year’s most hotly-anticipated video game.

Workers are booking time off for the Nov.

19 release of Grand Theft Auto VI , and one widely shared estimate cited by the International Business Times put the cost to the U.S. economy at $1 billion in a single day.

But is the country really going to lose that much economic output because of a video game? Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of the Holy Cross who studies sports and major events, disputes that number.

“But even if it were true, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if people are happier,” he said.

“And it’s pretty tiny in the big picture anyway.” The broader point is that estimates about lost productivity—whether from the Super Bowl, or the latest Star Wars movie, or the next Sony Playstation console—are probably bogus: these events are merely rearranging when workers take their vacation.

And Matheson points to the simple age-old phenomenon economists love to point to: the substitution effect.

When some event changes spending or productivity, it won’t simply be removed from the economy so much so it’ll shift when that spending or productivity occurs.

Where did the billion-dollar estimate came from The source for the $1 billion estimate for GTA-driven lost productivity is widely cited to come from José García Montalvo, an economist at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. (Montalvo did not respond to a request for comment).

The South Atlantic news agency MercoPress notes that the data does not come from a published study, and has been circulating for much of the past year.

Still, people are still going to take time off—just maybe not to the effect of a 10-figure hit to the economy.

BambooHR, which sells HR software, told Money that time-off requests for Nov.