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Hundreds of people queued outside branches of the retailer Game on Thursday evening to pick up a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2, the wildly anticipated new title from the creators of Grand Theft Auto series.
Stores in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and London were among those which opened at midnight. Large numbers of gamers wanted to buy the title, the first release by Rockstar Games since 2013’s record-breaking Grand Theft Auto V.
Deliveroo, the food delivery service, brought orders punters in the queue, who wanted hard copies of the game, in spite of the availability of digital downloads.
The early critical consensus suggests that the fans’ eagerness is justified. The Guardian gave it five stars, calling it “a new high water-mark for lifelike video game worlds”, and on Metacritic, the review aggregator, it has an average score of 97%, making it the best Playstation 4 game of all time – tied with Grand Theft Auto V.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is unlikely to break the records of its predecessor. Grand Theft Auto V is the single most successful entertainment release of all time – bigger than any Star Wars movie – and has sold over 100m copies and earned $6bn since its release.
But Red Dead is perhaps the most technically advanced and realistic video game yet. Its eight-year development involved over 3,000 people, including 1,000 actors to voice its cast, and it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make.
A comment from Dan Houser, the studio’s co-founder, about working “100-hour weeks” on the game prompted accounts of mandatory overtime and a high-pressure atmosphere from current and former employees around the world. Other employees used social media to share positive experiences at the company.
The studio released figures claiming that the average working week was around 42-46 hours, rising to 50 or more during busy times. Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North in Edinburgh, its biggest studio, said that this latest game necessitated huge changes in the studio’s logistics that helped alleviate the workload: “Making these triple-A games requires more and more and more people and logistics … The [working] culture and what [are] acceptable work practices [have] also grown. It’s all really changed for the better … As games are getting more complicated, we’re trying to figure out how to manage it.”
In recent years, many video game publishers have shifted focus from expensive, cinematic games intended for a solo player, to multiplayer games such as Fortnite, League of Legends and Destiny, which encourage people to keep playing for months or years and provide ongoing revenue streams.
A multiplayer mode for Red Dead Redemption 2, entitled Red Dead Online, will launch in November and will be free to anyone who buys the game. Rockstar Games will be hoping for a repeat of the success of Grand Theft Auto Online, the multiplayer version of its behemoth crime series, which has been live since late 2013 and had earned over $500m from players’ in-game purchases by mid-2016.
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