The game might not be due until next year, but Microsoft is already tipping Crackdown 2 as a major seller for Xbox 360.

According to the format-holder, Xbox Live usage figures show that the original’s official global sales number is dwarfed by data which shows millions more played pre-owned copies.

“We sold 1.7m and if you look at the number of Live users and the pre-owned market there are a lot of people who have put Crackdown in their 360 and played that game – well over two million have played it on Live, and that doesn’t include the offline players,” Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Game Studios, told MCV.

Crackdown 2 was first announced at E3, but Microsoft only showed a brief trailer for the game.

The title is in development at Dundee, Scotland-based Ruffian Games, a new start-up founded by the lead designer of the original game, developed at nearby Realtime Worlds, which was released in 2007.

Spencer reckons that leaving some time between the original game’s release and its follow- up has allowed Microsoft to make sure the game has a devoted audience – meaning that Crackdown 2 will be a bigger commercial hit than its popular predecessor.

“It would have been easy to chase the money, but I want to make sure that anything we work on has a chance to take hold and gain avid customers to nurture,” he explained.

“We own the IP and we could have easily just found another developer out there and done something called Crackdown 2 but we wanted it to be special.”

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