As if the $50 Red Dead Redemption PC port wasn't enough of an insult, you can get Red Dead Redemption 2 for less than that on Steam right now

John Martson points a shotgun at the screen in keyart for Red Dead Redemption. — (Image credit: Rockstar)

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.

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Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.