One of my favourite times of the year is when Take-Two updates sales figures for Rockstar Games. GTA5 has sold to 210m people and Red Dead Redemption 2 is a relative flop at only 70m.
Yes, a mere 70m copies. So why does it feel like it was abandoned? Don’t get me wrong, nobody is going to complain about the amount of content in that game.
It’s a colossal world with systems upon systems, and we’re still discovering new things today. There was a time when “cutting content” for DLC was frowned upon, and whatever the actual DLC consisted of, people were angry it wasn’t just there to begin with.
Those days are gone, and few games come out without some kind of long-term monetisation in mind. For Red Dead 2 it was Red Dead Online, a cowboy-themed sandbox that on paper sounds like a fantastic escape.
But it wasn’t GTA Online, and it didn’t pick up in the same way, and so Rockstar abandoned it. What about single player content?