How many copies did Red Dead Redemption sell? — 2024 statistics

Red Dead Redemption sales have surpassed 78 million copies.

(Sources: Statista, TweakTown)

• Red Dead Redemption sales reached 23 million copies.
• Red Dead Redemption 2 sales reached 55 million copies.

The base way of determining how successful a game is is to check its total number of sales since its release. In the case of the Red Dead Redemption series, we can see that it has sold a monstrous 73 million copies, which is quite impressive considering that Red Dead Redemption 2 carries a majority of the sales at 50 million. This makes perfect sense as Red Dead Redemption 2 is definitely the better game, but one game being better than the other doesn’t diminish the quality of a series.

Red Dead Redemption budget was $100 million.

(Sources: GameReactor, GameFAQs)

• Sales projections claimed that the game needed to sell 5 million copies to be profitable.
• It sold 1.44 million copies in its first week.
• It sold 870,000 copies for Xbox 360 and 570,000 copies for PS3 in the first week.

This is a perfect example of ambition paying off. Red Dead Redemption is an excellent game, and a major reason for its success can be attributed to its excellent marketing campaign, which cost approximately $50 million. Getting people excited about something way in advance is a good way of keeping them interested in it after the fact, which is exactly what happened with this game.

Red Dead Redemption 2 sales reached an estimated 6.23 million units in retail within just 2 days.

(Source: VG Chartz)

• 4.6 million (74%) copies were sold for the PlayStation 4.
• 1.6 million (26%) copies were sold for the Xbox One.
• 2.7 million units were sold in Europe.
• 2.3 million copies were sold in the United States.
• 133,731 units were sold in Japan.

The hype surrounding Red Dead Redemption 2 was there before, during, and after its release, as is apparent when you take a look at its sales in its first two days. 6.23 million is more copies than some entire franchises manage to sell in their lifetime, and RDR2 managed that in a fraction of the time.

Red Dead Redemption 2 made $725 million in its first three days.

(Source: Games Industry)

• This was the second-biggest opening for a product in entertainment history.
• The biggest opening belongs to GTA V, which gathered over $1 billion in revenue in its first 3 days.
• Red Dead Redemption 2 has the biggest opening weekend for Take-Two ever, since GTA V was released on a Tuesday.

How much money did Red Dead Redemption make? A large number of sales is bound to come with massive profits, right? Of course! Imagine the look on the CEO of Rockstar Games’ face when they saw the profits of a single game rack up nearly a billion dollars again. Yes, again. Although GTA V managed to bring in more money than RDR2, it doesn’t diminish the titan of a game that it turned out to be on release.

Red Dead Redemption 2 budget was $540 million.

(Source: ScreenRant)

• It is possible that half of the budget was dedicated to marketing.
• Red Dead Redemption is among the most expensive games ever.
• The closest game to Red Dead Redemption 2’s budget is Star Citizen at $320 million.
• Even GTA V was cheaper to develop at $264 million.

There is a staggering difference between the production costs of these two games, and the reason for that is obvious. Red Dead Redemption 2 is much, much larger than its predecessor, featuring a larger map, more characters, a longer story, and more animals to hunt. Of course, the game also had a huge marketing budget as well.

Red Dead Redemption 2 reached 66,539 concurrent players in January 2023.

(Source: Rockstar Intel)

• The game usually has between 12,000 and 30,000 players each month.
• The surge began on January 7th, 2023 when the game’s concurrent player count reached 66,539.
• Red Dead Redemption 2 was the 6th best-selling game on Steam for the first week of 2023.

The reason for such a surge in players is most likely the Steam Autumn sale, which features price drops of up to 95%, prompting players to pick up Red Dead Redemption 2, some for the first time, and some veterans wanting to re-live the game again. Either way, it’s a massive boost to the longevity of the game and to its reputation.

Red Dead Online had 1,500 average monthly players in October 2022 on Steam.

(Source: Steam Charts)

• The peak number of players for the same month was 2,924.
• The highest average monthly player count was in December 2020 with 11,324.
• This equates to an 86.4% decrease in the average monthly player count.

This is the point where we have to face the reality of some situations. Red Dead Redemption, while a great game on its own, simply could not keep up with the quality and replayability of other Rockstar games, so it has been in a steady player decline

Players spent 156,945 years playing Red Dead Redemption in its first two weeks.

(Source: Visual.ly)

• 5,614 years were spent in jail.
• 14 million hours were played.
• Horse theft was committed 1,877,655 times.
• Arson was committed 808,664 times.
• Robberies were committed 861,998 times.
• Murder was committed 131,904,068 times.
• 15,072,596 humans were executed.
• 13,250,327 U.S. soldiers were killed.
• 12,571,407 characters were trampled by horses.
• 8.6 liters of alcohol were drunk by the residents of New Austin annually.
• 5,773,917 hats were shot off in duels.
• 300,000 miles were traveled by trains.
• 2,105,315 cows were killed.
• 7,771,916 bears were killed.
• 9,292,359 cougars were killed.
• 28,215,951 deer were killed.
• 55,813,649 wolves were killed.

This line of stats is just to show how players were devoted to Red Dead Redemption when it first came out, as the success of the first game would decide if Rockstar Games would continue to develop a sequel. As you can see, the game performed amazingly and because of that, we have what we have today.

13.32% of Red Dead Redemption 2 players are from the United States.

(Source: PlayerCounter)

• 10.11% of players are from Russia.
• 7.50% of players are from Brazil.
• 5.44% of players are from Germany.
• 5.23% of players are from the United Kingdom.

It makes sense that a majority of Red Dead Redemption 2 players are from the United States since the game is set there and it was marketed toward U.S. gamers the most.

Red Dead Redemption 2 had 55.5 million hours watched on Twitch in 2022.

(Source: SullyGnome)

• The game had 2.9 million broadcasting hours.
• It had 5,770 viewers on average.
• 334 channels were streaming the game on average.
• It had a viewer ratio of 17.2.
• Its max viewer count was 101,851.
• There were 287,754 broadcasters streaming the game.

As you can see, despite being a single-player game, Red Dead Redemption 2 still brings in a ton of Twitch viewers each day, with its total hours watched in 2022 equaling 55.5 million. This is excellent considering that the game was released in 2019 and most single-player games lose their appeal once everyone knows what it is about. This is not the case with Red Dead Redemption 2, as it has remained popular for years after its release.

To sum up

This is where our journey comes to an end! That is all we have to say about the legendary Red Dead Redemption series and everything it had accomplished over the years. The first game was released in 2010 and it was essentially the first proper open-world game featuring the Wild West that the gaming industry had in a long time, and it left a massive footprint that is immensely hard to fill and will remain so until either Red Dead Redemption 3 comes out or a game of the same caliber of the previous two is released. Only time can tell that, and until then, we sincerely hope that you have enjoyed the content we have provided here and we hope that all of your questions have been answered.