It took 14 years for Red Dead Redemption to finally show up on PC and it's going to launch tomorrow at a steeper price than its five-year-old sequel on Steam.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is only $34.99 until November 4, $15 cheaper than a game from way back in the Xbox 360 era. It's the Ultimate Edition, too, so it comes with a handful of items for the story and the multiplayer.
Even though they're both pretty different Western epics, it's absurd that Rockstar is forcing us to pay almost as much money for the first game as its expansive sequel when it's not on sale. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick called the price "commercially accurate," but I'm calling it greedy for a game that hits the bare minimum for what we'd expect from a modern port, like ultrawide, HDR, DLSS, and high refresh rate support. Maybe it would've gone over better if it showed up 10 years ago.
I suspect we'll be discussing a similar discrepancy in price a year or so after the console release of Grand Theft Auto 6, when Rockstar finally throws us PC players a bone. The studio is pretty inconsistent with how long it takes to bring its games over to PC, but it's always at least six months later and at full price. The whole approach is just as frustrating as the way Nintendo sells games from almost a decade ago for the same price they launched with.
The maddening part about all of it is that it's probably not going to stop anytime soon. I think a lot of PC players would be happier about paying full price if it didn't take years to get the games in the first place. It doesn't help that when we do finally get them, they can be a complete mess that requires waiting even longer for patches to clean them up.
So here we are with a port of a game from 14 years ago that is somehow more expensive than its sequel. It highlights how egregious it is to charge $50 for an old game, and will probably convince more PC players to skip what is a pretty fantastic game from what I remember.
