I did not quite understand why my timeline was suddenly being spammed by a ton of Red Dead Redemption 2 praise and nostalgic clips from Rockstar’s 2018 blockbuster. Why is Red Dead suddenly everywhere, when the past year has already been stacked with top notch games that surely are still in people’s backlogs?
Well, turns out there are a few different reasons which all add up to a whole lot of playtime.
Sales – This started around Black Friday in late November where the game was deeply discounted, but there’s also a current sale going on where the game is 67% off and selling for $20 on places like Steam, where that offer ends January 4. If you were waiting a very, very long time for deep discounts, five years at this point (four for PC), this is yet another opportunity to pick up the masterpiece game for cheap.
GTA 6 Hype – I am willing to bet that some level of hype spawned after the first GTA 6 trailer has contributed to this, that people are itching for a good Rockstar title, but GTA 5 itself is a decade old, and Red Dead Redemption 2, as evidenced by all the clips being posted, shows just how well the game holds up over time. Though fans are still hoping for a 60 fps update at some point. Good luck.
Content Creators – Specially, I am seeing YouTuber Act Man’s playthrough all over social media right now. He’s got almost two million subscribers on YouTube and his video on his first playthrough has half a million views in three days. Granted, I am sure this is a much, much smaller contribution than the sales, but I’ve heard it cited a lot.
It’s Just Great – I mean, what can you say about Red Dead 2? It’s another Rockstar masterwork, with an incredible 97 on Metacritic and dozens and dozens of hours of gameplay, ranging from deep drama to goofy moments like murdering people on train tracks. The visuals hold up, the story holds up, there’s no reason not to play it if you never did. But yeah it’s certainly happening in big numbers right now especially.
Red Dead 2 is a bit of an odd case, though. While the base game was good, unlike the original Red Dead, it never got any DLC for the main game, but rather Rockstar pulled a GTA 5 and just sunk time and resources into Red Dead Online, a forever neglected version of GTA Online that never really took off, and those who did commit to playing felt like Rockstar never really figured out how to properly support it, despite several years of trying. It feels like the wrong investment in the wrong portion of the game, even though yes, it clearly did work out for GTA 5. But the base game still stands on its own legs, to be sure.
So yeah, pay $20, get Red Dead, play Red Dead. Incredible game that everyone should experience.
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