Following Take-Two’s earnings report yesterday, Red Dead Redemption 2 has officially become the ninth best-selling game of all time. Arguably one of the best single-player experiences of the last console generation, Red Dead Redemption 2 has now sold over 45 million copies. That’s an increase of around 1 million copies in the last quarter alone, which is incredibly impressive for a nearly three-year-old single-player-focused title.
Of course, Red Dead Redemption 2 also comes with Red Dead Online, which Rockstar announced it would no longer be supporting with major updates during the last quarter. Grand Theft Auto V, with GTA Online, has been supported extensively and sold around 5 million copies in the last quarter.
Rockstar’s stealth announcement that it would no longer be supporting Red Dead Online with “major themed content updates” coincided with the much-publicized funeral that fans of Red Dead Online held for the game on July 13. The funeral had been planned prior to Rockstar’s announcement, and it solidified Rockstar abandoning the game, which fans had been accusing the company of doing for years.
Now that Red Dead Redemption 2 has entered the list of the top 10 best-selling games of all time, fans (and mourners) of Red Dead Online are likely to be even more baffled at Rockstar’s decision to underserve the game since its launch. The first Red Dead Redemption received a multitude of both multiplayer and single-player DLC. The Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare expansion is one of the best-ever examples of DLC for a single-player game.
In its announcement that it would no longer be supporting Red Dead Online with major content updates, Rockstar stated that it needed to move resources over to the next Grand Theft Auto game that it has confirmed is in development. According to a report by Kotaku in May, another casualty of the shift towards Grand Theft Auto 6 is the rumored Red Dead Redemption remaster. The Red Dead Redemption remaster is thought to also be a casualty of the poor reception that Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition received from fans upon its disastrous launch.
Rockstar tried to reboot Red Dead Online by releasing it as a standalone game with a $5 launch price in December 2020. Despite this, the company failed to follow up on the relaunch with substantial content updates. The biggest and only substantial content update since the standalone launch came in July 2021 with the Blood Money update. The lack of updates since last year sparked the #SaveRedDeadOnline campaign earlier this year. In response to the campaign in May, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that Rockstar would update players and that their frustrations had been heard. Two months later, Rockstar updated players by killing Red Dead Online completely.
