The cowboy epic Red Redemption 2 is experiencing a small renaissance on Steam in December 2021. The game has the most players there since February 2020. Reviews rave about the game, with 91% of player ratings in the last 30 days being positive. Despite this, not much actually happens in the game, even though it was supposed to be a vibrant MMO. What’s going on?
How has the player count on Steam developed?
- This concerns the player numbers of Red Dead Redemption 2 on Steam. This includes the single-player and multiplayer parts; although there is also a discounted standalone version of “Red Dead Online” for €10, we will not consider it here.
- Red Dead Redemption 2 came to Steam late – because of the exclusivity deal with Epic Games. In December 2019, the game had an average of 28,626 players at launch. By then, it had already been playable for over a year on consoles and had been released a month earlier on the Epic Games Store and in its own launcher.
- In the following years, this player count plummeted to 11,600 (June 2020) – but now in December 2021 it has risen again to 22,495. This brings it back nearly to the strength it had at Steam release and is the best average player count since February 2020.
Rockstar neglects cowboys in favor of GTA 5
Why is this so strong? It is somewhat puzzling, as Red Dead Redemption 2 is treated so poorly by Rockstar. It was established early on that there would be no expansions for the single-player mode, only the online part was to be further developed.
However, nothing has really happened in the online part for 6 months. At the beginning of “Red Dead Online”, the game was nearly unplayable due to bugs and glitches, and only gradually were the issues resolved, bringing new content, updates, and DLCs that introduced new jobs. In July 2021, the last DLC “Blood Money” was released.
But for half a year, the development of Red Dead Online has practically stopped. Rockstar’s focus has shifted back to GTA Online in 2021, where big updates are still being released, although the game is already 8 years old. In any case, GTA 5 is one of the big winners of 2021 – a vibrant role-playing scene on Twitch fuels its success.
It seems that amidst all the commotion around GTA Online, Rockstar has pretty much forgotten and neglected their western epic.
Cowboys also have fun alone in the open world
Why is Red Dead Redemption 2 still so successful? Red Dead Online is an unusual MMO: Because it works so well as a single-player game and “few players” match the feeling of the lonely cowboy, RDR2 seems somewhat immune to content poverty and can work wonderfully even without much new content.
This makes it an extraordinary phenomenon: An MMO that hardly needs developer attention, yet still works:
- The game is now available at 50% off.
- The reviews for the last 30 days are a strong 91%.
- Apparently, the concept “Once you are done with the story, just continue playing it as an MMO” works perfectly.
A game that follows a similar concept to Red Dead Online could be Crimson Desert:
Crimson Desert sounds like it mixes an MMORPG with Red Dead Redemption 2
