Players Logged 17 Million Hours in Red Dead Redemption

We already know that Red Dead Redemption is the best sold videogame for the month of May in the United States, with the figures from the NPD Group showing that the Western-themed open world shooter managed to sell more than 1 million units on the Xbox 360 and on the PlayStation 3.

Now, a set of figures offered by the GameSpy game tracking service ATLUS shows that in the first two weeks of availability, gamers played Red Dead Redemption for no less than 17 million hours, committing no less than 132 million murders during this time, which means a man was killed in cold blood for around every 6 minutes of gameplay.

The statistical information does not stop there. The ATLUS service also counted around 1.9 million horse theft incidents, some of them followed by murder, 809,000 instances when players set property on fire with the intent of destroying it and 862,000 robberies of innocent individuals (probably not counting emptying the pockets of those who were already dead). It also seems that 3.33 billion dollars have been spent inside the game in the first two weeks and close to 6 million hats have been shot off during duels.

Red Dead Redemption, which we reviewed quite favorably a while ago, is built around the open world concepts that developers Rockstar pioneered in the Grand Theft Auto series but with a wide array of Western themes added and a more coherent and interesting narrative.

Publisher Take Two seems to have succeeded in creating a new long term franchise that can be placed along GTA in terms of sales, although it’s unclear how the game will go on, considering the surprising ending. Until talk of a sequel becomes the norm, Rockstar plans to put out more content for Red Dead Redemption, starting with some cooperative missions for multiplayer that are now available for all those who bought the title.