Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick made quite the comment when asked about the $ 50 pricing for the upcoming rerelease of Red Dead Redemption to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
Speaking to IGN, Zelnick said that “that’s just what we believe is the commercially accurate price for it.”
Later, Zelnick tried to justify the price further, by pointing out the value added to it with the addition of Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare. In Zelnick’s word, Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare “was a great standalone game in its own right when it was originally released, so we feel like it’s a great bundle for the first time, and certainly a great value for consumers.”
We had previously noted Zelnick’s statement from two years ago. Talking about the upcoming port of Grand Theft Auto V to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, he said that the company “actually takes the time to do the very best job we can making the title different for the new release, for the new technology that we’re launching it on.”
We are now at day two since Take-Two officially revealed this rerelease to modern platforms. Every sign indicates that this is as barebones a rerelease as any game company could have possibly made to rerelease an old game. Video comparisons are already out in the wild demonstrating that there are not tangible improvements on performance, and we mainly see better lighting effects. That is not nothing, but overall, fans would be right to call it very little change.
So, let’s make a comparison. Techland made a highly critically regarded port of Dying Light to the Nintendo Switch, released all the way back in 2021. Dying Light itself originally released on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. Techland made a lot of DLC for the game in the six years preceding the Switch port, and they bundled all that DLC in for the Switch’s Dying Light Platinum Edition.
That makes an extra 50 hours to play on the console, assuming you get hooked enough to play that long. Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare may be a significant and critically acclaimed expansion, but it adds 10 hours of gameplay at best. To be clear, it would not exactly be fair to make a 1:1 comparison here. But, if you are a Swtich owner, you definitely get more value for money in what Techland did in their port of Dying Light.
But let’s say you already had Dying Light on the Switch, and finished it long ago. There are other intangibles at play here. Red Dead Redemption has never been released in a Nintendo platform until now, so this is a big deal to that fandom. PlayStation fans may have their old games from the PlayStation 3, but if they want to play the game on their PlayStation 5, they have to get this rerelease.
But it’s a little more complicated for the folks at PlayStation. Of course, they need to go back to their original PS3 version, on their PlayStation 3s, if they want to play Red Dead Redemption’s online features. Xbox fans may not get anything new, but they can play that online on their newest consoles just fine.
So, with all this under consideration, is it really worth it to get this game for $ 50? On a personal level, I’m interested in this release particularly for the Switch. But I’m going to wait out for a clearly inevitable sale before I spend for it.
This rerelease doesn’t seem particularly impressive, but that’s fine as long as you don’t spend too much. As it is, Metroid Prime Remastered more than earns the $ 40 it retails for. This release, not so much.
Red Dead Redemption will be releasing to the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 this August 17, 2023.
