Red Dead Online players have worked out how long it takes to earn gold bars - and they're not ecstatic about it.

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The Red Dead Online beta has started rolling out, with owners of the Red Dead Redemption 2: Ultimate Edition able to jump in first. Although microtransactions aren't live just yet, Rockstar has confirmed that players will be able to buy gold bars at the in-game store. If you don't fancy reaching for your wallet, one gold bar could take you up to 8 hours to earn.In a post detailing what to expect in the beta, Rockstar states, "You may notice some areas of the in-game menus are not yet accessible or available during this early period of the Beta, such as the Red Dead Online in-game Store which will eventually open up to provide the option of purchasing gold bars to directly acquire cosmetic items like Camp décor, or a special style for your weapons."The good news here is that it seems that the gold bars will only be used to acquire cosmetics. The potentially bad news for players who don't want to fork out any cash, is that it could take a good while to earn even one bar, as demonstrated by Reddit user UnavailableIDs , via Wccftech The post was in response to another user who had claimed the bars would take 50 hours a piece to earn."Played around 4 hours yesterday. You need to get 100 nuggets to do one gold bar. You get in between 0.02 and 0.04 (0.02 gold bars = 2 nuggets) from series (deathmatch, races, etc.) which take 10 mins each or less.""Assuming you always get 0.02 and there's no loading time it takes 50 games (500 minutes) to get 1 gold bar. That makes 8h and 20 mins, and that's assuming you get the worst nugget reward and you always reach time limit."A few other users chimed in confirming that so far, this seems to be the case."I watched a Twitch stream with 9H 45M of playtime in online and I believe they had around 1.65 gold bars," said iitZJaay "I played for about 7 hours today doing nothing but the stranger missions, the main story missions, gang hideouts, and one or two open world events. I now have 0.87 gold bars. At this rate (on a very rough basis of calculation, but based of off my own play style that I consider pretty grind worthy) I’d basically have to play 40 hours a week for three weeks to unlock a decent horse," added Inowannausedesktop Bear in mind, Red Dead Online is still in beta, so we may see changes to the rate at which players earn cash and gold bars, and we still don't know how much the bars will cost in real-life money yet.Red Dead Online includes a battle royale mode , and you can find out when the beta goes live for you right here

Shabana is a freelance writer who enjoys JRPGs, wine, and not finishing games. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram