Bud Burruss plans to spend five vacation days in November, and Thanksgiving isn’t the reason for any of them.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, the 36-year-old software engineer said he has booked off the week leading into the holiday so he can play Grand Theft Auto VI. He insists he won’t destroy himself doing it, though he has no intention of easing into it either.
“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 said.
The plan: an early bedtime Wednesday, an alarm for roughly 1 or 2 a.m. Thursday, then straight into the game. The camera he uses to record footage for his YouTube channel is already in position.
The vacation math is getting out of hand
Burruss isn’t an extreme case. He’s somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Anna Ray, 30, who works in medical sales and wrestles professionally, has blocked out Thursday through Thursday and says she’ll cook her meals ahead of time so no hours disappear into the kitchen.
Over in Brazil, 34-year-old civil servant Guilherme Stephano is spending 10 days of his vacation allowance on the launch. That’s actually a reduction from the 20 days he burned on Red Dead Redemption 2 back in 2018 — a data point that says as much about the studio as it does about him.
Pile enough of those time-off requests onto one HR calendar and the week before Thanksgiving stops resembling a workweek and starts resembling a rolling outage.
What’s actually on the schedule
Rockstar has Grand Theft Auto 6 down for November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series — the month’s third Thursday. Fans have had the date marked for months, and they’ve spent more than a decade waiting for another entry in the franchise, which is about the length of time it takes a hobby to harden into an appointment.
Whether it ends up as the largest entertainment launch ever remains a forecast rather than a fact. The conditions, though, are all in place.
Less a game, more a place
An extended official preview dropped from Rockstar last week, and the community has been combing through the footage ever since.
One reaction keeps recurring among those who’ve seen it: it feels less like a game than like a place. A life simulator where you drift between high-pressure missions and errands with no stakes whatsoever.
Not everyone is sold. A good number of viewers walked away from the preview underwhelmed, and that response deserves to stay in the picture.
It’s also unlikely to dent the sales figures. Interest is broad enough to put entertainment and media records within reach, and a fair number of those buyers will be watching a Thursday clock tick toward 1 a.m. with the office lights switched off and a capture card already rolling.