Bud Burruss is taking five days off the week before Thanksgiving. He isn’t going anywhere. The 36-year-old software engineer plans to spend that stretch inside “Grand Theft Auto VI,” and he has already briefed his kids on what November looks like.
“We’ve got a couple of days where we’re like, ‘Daddy’s very busy,'” the father of three said. “I’m not going to be playing it for, like, 20 hours straight like an absentee father. But right out of the gate we’re going hard.”
He’s not an outlier. Projected sales by the end of launch week could top $4.5 billion, and global preorders have reached an estimated $260 million, according to analytics firm Newzoo. Both numbers are estimates from outside the company, not figures Rockstar Games or Take-Two have put out themselves.
The vacation-day math is getting silly
Guilherme Stephano, a 34-year-old in São Paulo, Brazil, is burning 10 vacation days on the game. That’s restraint by his standards. He took 20 days off for “Red Dead Redemption 2” in 2018.
“I’m a completionist,” Stephano said, meaning once he starts a game he has to see it out until the end.
Anna Ray, a 30-year-old medical-sales representative and professional wrestler in Arkansas, wanted proof the date would hold before she filed the request.
“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,” Ray said.
Her skepticism is earned
Rockstar first said the game was in development in 2022 and unveiled it in December 2023. Since then it’s been delayed repeatedly, including in the fall of 2025 and again in May 2026.
The current date is Nov. 19 on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Rockstar has not announced a PC release date.
Nearly half a billion views before anyone has played it
The first two trailers have close to half a billion combined views on YouTube, which is the clearest read anyone has on demand right now.
The latest trailer skipped the usual route entirely and debuted exclusively on Netflix on Aug. 27.
The appeal was never the plot
The franchise debuted in 1997 and drops players into an open world of street crime, reckless driving and half-naked adults. Polarizing, sure. It’s also one of the most popular series in gaming history, largely because of everything you can do while ignoring the main story: building a car collection, driving a cab, playing a round of golf.
“Grand Theft Auto V” arrived in 2013, made more than $1 billion and has sold 475 million copies, by reported figures. Thirteen years is a long time to keep an audience on the hook, and the hook held.
Which brings us to the detail that should worry HR departments more than the PTO requests. Some players are so set on clearing their calendars that they’re reenlisting in the army, because it gets them a four-day pass when the game comes out.
