A game can sell tens of millions of copies, collect a ton of awards and still remain the least favorite child of its own studio. Because it doesn’t bring gold bars.
The arithmetic here is almost mocking. GTA V was released in 2013 on PS3 and Xbox 360, in 2014 it received versions for PS4 and Xbox One, and in March 2022 it reached PS5 and Xbox Series, that is, it lived through three generations of consoles.
Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in October 2018 on PS4 and Xbox One, a year later came to PC and since then it has been launched on current consoles exclusively through backward compatibility, without a native build, without an increased personnel ceiling, without resolution by modern standards.
The reason that the community is talking about They say literally called Red Dead Online. The online mode started in beta in November 2018, received a separate boxed version in December 2020, and in July 2022 Rockstar officially announced a reduction in updates and the transfer of resources to GTA VI.
In fact, this was a transfer to support mode without content, while at the same time GTA Online continued to churn out billions on Shark Cards.
The income gap is truly obscene: according to estimates circulating online, the online GTA brought in about nine million dollars a week, and the Wild West – about half a million. Only they invested in these two universes in completely different ways, which became the main argument of critics.
One said directly:
It’s like starving and beating one of your two children and then wondering why he’s not an excellent student.
Players are still unhappy that Arthur from the art of Red Dead Redemption 2 does not look like the game version
And after all, the ideas were on the surface, moreover, collected from mechanics that already work in the story campaign. What never appeared in Red Dead Online:
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buying real estate and your own ranch with caring for livestock, as in the epilogue of the main story
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a full-fledged craft system instead of the role of a bounty hunter and trader
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train and stagecoach robberies of the level of raids from Los Santos
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working for the law or for the crime families of Saint Denis
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the second character on the account, for whom you do not need to create a new profile
A separate pain is the story additions, which the studio has not released since the PS3 era. The “single doesn’t pay for itself” argument breaks down when Undead Nightmare sells two million copies. At the same time Red Dead Redemption 2 remains in the top three or four best-selling games in history and, according to Take-Two reports, has exceeded 80 million copies, and the opening weekend brought in $725 million.
