So while the fact that quality games that are fun to play by respected developers that receive a big marketing push from a huge publisher and then receive solid reviews and continued word-of-mouth recommendations post release end up selling well might not be the shocker of the year, just how well Red Dead Redemption appears to have sold is still pretty astounding. 6.9 million copies of the western sandbox game have shipped worldwide.

And while 'shipped' does not mean sold to consumers and being played, and only represents the number of games sold to stores, math and common sense kind of dictates most of those 6.9 million games have been sold to consumers and are not just sitting in stores, secret warehouses, or landfills (cough, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game, cough). Nope, people are buying and playing this game. That is right...

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Not too shabby for the sequel to Red Dead Revolver, a game no one really knew or cared about. Maybe this serves as a little comfort to all the guys at Rockstar San Diego that lost their jobs after laboring on the game for so long...yeah, probably not, losing your job always sucks, but at least they have a quality game on their resume -- remember, I try to be a glass half-full kind of guy.

Are you one of the millions of gamers that picked this game up? I have to admit, it still sits in my yet-to-be-purchased pile of shame while the rest of the Game Rant team play it. I know, I know. I really want to play the game, I bet I would love it, but I just keep putting it off. I keep telling myself I do not want to get into the game until I have enough time to do the game's expansive world justice... and so I wait, and I wait. And then as I wait, the game just keeps getting bigger and bigger with more and more DLC. What is a gamer to do sometimes? Well, hey, this means at least one more copy that might still be sitting on a shelf somewhere is going to get adopted and get a nice home sometime soon, so there is that right?

Red Dead Redemption is available now on PS3, Xbox 360.