How many copies has Red Dead Redemption 2 sold?

How to get close to this number

Place it against the studio's other title. Its stablemate sits in the low hundreds of millions with a decade of online sales behind it; this one has a much shorter tail and no comparable persistent mode, so it should land well below that and well above an ordinary hit. The upper end of the tens of millions is the right band.

The production figures in the explanation are the more significant number: roughly eight years and a team over a thousand strong. That scale of investment is why single-player games of this ambition have become rare — the budget only makes sense at sales levels very few titles reach, which pushes the industry toward live-service models with longer revenue tails.

It is also the most-cited example in the industry's argument about working conditions, and that context belongs alongside the sales figure rather than separate from it. A number that large is the output of a very large number of people working for a very long time, and the two facts are not independent of each other.