It’s Good That Red Dead Online Is Officially Dead
Just a day after Red Dead Online players agreed to hold a mock funeral in protest of the lack of updates, Rockstar killed the game officially. That’s one way to one up your critics, I guess. While there is a chaotic side of me that hopes the timing was deliberate - what’s one more ‘fuck you’ to the players, eh? - ultimately it’s for the best. Players and Rockstar can both move on with their lives.
I wrote recently in praise of Rockstar pushing back against the demand that it waste its time on remakes, and this feels very similar. I’m less willing to praise Rockstar for abandoning Red Dead Online, but it all comes from the same place. Rockstar makes the biggest games in the business, and with the scope set to get even bigger in the current gen, that means we can expect GTA 6 to be colossal. That means it needs to move resources around, and with GTA Online unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon, Red Dead Online is what had to give.
Related: Rockstar Is Right, Remakes Are “Beneath Them”
A recent statement from Rockstar confirmed that while GTA Online will continue to see “gameplay updates”, Red Dead Online will receive no “major themed content updates like in previous years”. It’s dead. And now we can all move on.
For the record, I am not saying it’s a good thing that Rockstar abandoned Red Dead Online in the first place. It’s very strange that, considering the huge success of GTA Online and the massive sales numbers of Red Dead Redemption 2, the online mode was left to die. Perhaps GTA Online’s complete domination was a hindrance - rather than creating an entirely new online mode that lets you a posse of friends pony up in the dying days of the Old West, we instead get GTA Online in a cowboy outfit. It was never going to
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