Rockstar Games’ highly-anticipated open-world western, Red Dead Redemption 2, released this past Friday just before the weekend. And while gamers had two free days of nothing but Red Dead ahead of them, many still couldn’t resist calling out of work with Red Dead Redemption 2 sickness.
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That’s right, apparently a lot of people played hookey to play cowboy. This is at least according to social analytics firm, Fizziology, who tracked the data via social media on who was taking off work to play the new title, and apparently, more people called in sick to work for Red Dead Redemption 2 than for any other game this year.
According to the firm, Red Dead Redemption 2 had 1.5 more people talking about taking a day off than the next highest game this year, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Meanwhile, it has 3-times more than PlayStation 4 juggernauts God of War and Spider-Man, and 12-times more than Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which apparently people didn’t like enough to pretend to be sick over.
It’s worth noting that there’s no way confirming that the people who talked about playing sick, actually did it, but it’s still interesting to know Red Dead Redemption 2 garnered the most chatter about playing hookey in order to have a nice three-day weekend with it.
Fizziology also reports that the game has also simply just been really hot on Twitter, cultivating 14,000 mentions per hour since launch. Looking at 800,000 of these tweets, Fizziology also found out that 85 percent of them come from men the ages of 18-to-35. In other words, there’s not as many women talking about skipping work for the game, nor older men, nor highschoolers talking about skipping school.
It’s no surprise that Red Dead Redemption 2 has people wanting to miss work for it more than any other game this year. For one, it’s Rockstar Games’ joint, and two, it’s the highest-rated game this generation.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is available for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. At the moment, there has been no word of a PC or Nintendo Switch port, though the former sure has been leaking a lot.
For more news and coverage on the game, click here.
Thanks, VentureBeat.
