Check out the size of this ride: Red Dead Redemption 2 arrived on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 26, 2018, and eight days later it already had 17 million units shipped to stores. The number came out in the financial report of Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar’s parent company, presented on November 7, 2018.
The detail that stopped everyone: in just over a week, the game surpassed everything the first Red Dead Redemption, from 2010, had sold in eight years. Take-Two president Strauss Zelnick reinforced the comparison in an interview with CNBC. And it did not stop there: the opening weekend brought in more than 725 million dollars, which the company called “the biggest opening weekend in entertainment history.”
Critics came along too. The game scored 97 on Metacritic on both platforms and, weeks later, won four awards at The Game Awards 2018: best audio design, best narrative, best score and music, and best performance, for Roger Clark, who plays Arthur Morgan.
Not everything was a party, though. Before launch, co-founder Dan Houser said the team had worked “100-hour weeks” several times in 2018. The remark opened a heavy debate about crunch in the industry, and Rockstar clarified that this applied only to the senior writing team, for three weeks, and that nobody was required to work overtime.
What came next
The online mode, Red Dead Online, opened in public beta on November 27, 2018, with events for up to 32 players. The PC version came out on November 5, 2019, and the Stadia one on November 19 of the same year. In July 2022, Rockstar said the big online updates would stop, to focus on GTA VI. In sales, the Western kept galloping: it passed 87 million copies and became one of the best-selling games in history. For fans of open-world Westerns, it remains a must-stop.
Source: CNBC / Take-Two Interactive.
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