Did Rockstar Abandon The Best Selling Game In The World?

[jeroll3d]

RDR2 is one of the best-selling games - if not 'the game' - on the planet, one of the best-selling games in the history of the gaming industry (it's the best made, for sure). On Steam, it is number one in the best-selling games in the world (weekend).

I (speculating) would love to know what drives a company to abandon one of the company's most successful games?

Edited September 6 by jeroll3d

[JumpingKentFlash]

It’s the ninth best selling game ever I think, and yes they abandoned it.

[Calvaine]

I wouldn't count out the possibility of single player DLC just yet, but I'm certainly not getting my hopes up.

 

As to why the Online side was abandoned, it seems to come down to a couple of different factors.

 

Firstly, when the game released it was fairly broken - and wasn't fixed for a while. Animals and NPCs had small spawn rates, clothing and guns were insanely overpriced (but you were always reminded they could be bought with gold instead) and there were a number of bugs. Cap that off with there being no roles and not really a great amount to do, the player base probably plummeted in the early stages. I think the nature of the game didn't help too much either, as the average GTA fan probably went back to the Michael Bay inspired carnage of explosions, flying bikes and promoted griefing.

 

Secondly, there's the microtransactions. Once all of the above had been 'mostly' addressed, many people came back to RDO. It likely wasn't pulling in the player base numbers that GTA was (and still is), but it was certainly healthy. What Rockstar didn't realise, for some reason, was that their precious gold was extremely easy to earn in-game after these new activities were implemented. That led to no one buying microtransactions, Rockstar's attention focusing more onto GTA (which has made billions from microtransactions) and thus RDO didn't receive regular content updates. Those updates that did release, however, tended to have a mixed reception. The Naturalist role for example was something I personally enjoyed, but it wasn't the hard hitting Outlaw themed content the game desperately needed and a lot of people really didn't like it. Importantly, it was definitely not enough content for a patch all on it's own.

 

Combine all of this together and you have plentiful reasons to cause the player base to go into a steady decline and Rockstar's care to dwindle, and by the time Rockstar decided neuter the gold making methods like two years after we all had mounds of gold up to our eyeballs, the few people who still cared about the game slowly whittled away. In contrast, newcomers to the game found themselves in a bit of a tight spot as gold is very, very grindy to earn now and they can't really engage with the roles in quick succession as it requires gold to unlock the ability to play them.

 

 

 

[jeroll3d]

(edited)... a big update today, anyone have the patch notes? (i found it)

 

 

(a update here - on Steam, 1º on sellers list on last weekend) 

 

Happy with this update.

Edited September 6 by jeroll3d

[éX-Driver]

The main problem is they just misjudged the playerbase. They thought the crossover with GTAO would be near-1:1, and that they could use the same marketing tactics and gameplay design that keeps people playing GTA. I don’t think they ever fully realised the mistake, and now it’s probably too late to course-correct. FFXIV only managed its turnaround because it’s an MMO with a rabid fanbase attached to the brand, if it had been anything other than a Final Fantasy game it wouldn’t’ve worked. And regardless of Redemption 2’s sales, the fanbase for the game just isn’t like the one for FF. ¾ of people who bought Redemption 2 never finished the second chapter, much less ever played RDO. 

[awanderers1877]

Because horses and repeaters don't appeal to the wider masses as much as flying motorbikes and laser guns.

 

Rockstar being a rational corporation focused on maximizing their profits they decided to allocate their resources to the product that generates the most income, as crazy as this may seem 

 

Edited September 11 by awanderers1877

[Banana]

On 9/6/2022 at 7:15 AM, Calvaine said:

I wouldn't count out the possibility of single player DLC just yet

 

 

 

Copium

[Nerfgoth]

5 hours ago, éX-Driver said:

The main problem is they just misjudged the playerbase. They thought the crossover with GTAO would be near-1:1, and that they could use the same marketing tactics and gameplay design that keeps people playing GTA. I don’t think they ever fully realised the mistake, and now it’s probably too late to course-correct. FFXIV only managed its turnaround because it’s an MMO with a rabid fanbase attached to the brand, if it had been anything other than a Final Fantasy game it wouldn’t’ve worked. And regardless of Redemption 2’s sales, the fanbase for the game just isn’t like the one for FF. ¾ of people who bought Redemption 2 never finished the second chapter, much less ever played RDO. 

 

It was to few dlc added to the game, no long term plans for the game! And now they are trying their hardest to bury it with news about GTAVI.

And on twitch the game has very low viewer base...

 

Spoiler

As now there is only 2.6 Tn viewers on twitch and that nothing with GTAV with 98.2 Tn viewers.

 

1 hour ago, awanderers1877 said:

Because horses and repeaters don't appeal to the wider masses as much as flying motorbikes and laser guns.

 

i think they should have gone all in steampunk.....

[éX-Driver]

12 hours ago, Nerfgoth said:

 

It was to few dlc added to the game, no long term plans for the game! And now they are trying their hardest to bury it with news about GTAVI.

And on twitch the game has very low viewer base...

 

  Hide contents

As now there is only 2.6 Tn viewers on twitch and that nothing with GTAV with 98.2 Tn viewers.

 

 

i think they should have gone all in steampunk.....

Steampunk is the exact opposite direction they should’ve gone in. They should’ve doubled down on the survivalism and ‘living breathing world’ immersion. The vast majority of long-running MMOs have things like jobs and player-driven economies for a reason. It’s stuff that sucks you into the game world and makes you feel like you are a part of it, rather than an outsider looking in. RDO never really had this, and that’s where it failed. The best part of the singleplayer was the immersion and how you could put Arthur and John on a schedule and actually participate both in the camp and in the towns, if you wanted to. 

[awanderers1877]

16 hours ago, Nerfgoth said:

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

As now there is only 2.6 Tn viewers on twitch and that nothing with GTAV with 98.2 Tn viewers.

 

 

i think they should have gone all in steampunk.....

 

They sort of did on these Halloween passes 

[Direwrath]

A visualization of the current situation with RDO.

Guess who is in the Coach?

 

 

[Nerfgoth]

On 9/12/2022 at 3:35 AM, éX-Driver said:

Steampunk is the exact opposite direction they should’ve gone in. They should’ve doubled down on the survivalism and ‘living breathing world’ immersion. The vast majority of long-running MMOs have things like jobs and player-driven economies for a reason. It’s stuff that sucks you into the game world and makes you feel like you are a part of it, rather than an outsider looking in. RDO never really had this, and that’s where it failed. The best part of the singleplayer was the immersion and how you could put Arthur and John on a schedule and actually participate both in the camp and in the towns, if you wanted to. 

 

Like this?

 

 

[Ziggy_Ivanhoe]

The people responsible for making GTAV and RDR2 are mostly gone and T2 is moving into live service gaming across the board. The underlying architecture is too hard to work with to make both GTAO and RDO into nice live service, always online games that has low maintenance. Just look how long it took to get RDO just to work properly. Honestly, it's still pretty bunk. Its just economics. They are becoming a bloated company (T2 that is) and expenses are probably rising every month plus they are moving all in on GTA 6 and a new version of GTAO probably. This is why they basically just gave everyone carte blanche to print money in solo lobbies. Milked it for close to 10 years but it's coming to an end soon. 

[Nerfgoth]

15 minutes ago, Ziggy_Ivanhoe said:

The people responsible for making GTAV and RDR2 are mostly gone and T2 is moving into live service gaming across the board. The underlying architecture is too hard to work with to make both GTAO and RDO into nice live service, always online games that has low maintenance. Just look how long it took to get RDO just to work properly. Honestly, it's still pretty bunk. Its just economics. They are becoming a bloated company (T2 that is) and expenses are probably rising every month plus they are moving all in on GTA 6 and a new version of GTAO probably. This is why they basically just gave everyone carte blanche to print money in solo lobbies. Milked it for close to 10 years but it's coming to an end soon. 

 

Working properly? Ha and double ha.... Latest dlc broke the game again... And it is the p2p system that breaks the game.

I think RDO was a lackmust test for GTO 2.0 for what they can get away with. Aka spend as little money and time to develop an update for maximum profit.

And looking at games like CoD, Destiney 2 and now OW2 they all have grindy battlepasses but you can pay with real money to get the premium variant of it. The passes in RDO was never that hard to level up. What is strange is that latest GTAO dlc was like the last update before closing shop.

 

I think I had still to much hopium and copium when I saw, read about how EA and Bioware treated Anthem and never thought R* and T2 could do the same mistake but instead like Hello Games and Bethesda work hard to have a product to be proud of!

 

[Ziggy_Ivanhoe]

Just now, Nerfgoth said:

 

Working properly? Ha and double ha.... Latest dlc broke the game again... And it is the p2p system that breaks the game.

I think RDO was a lackmust test for GTO 2.0 for what they can get away with. Aka spend as little money and time to develop an update for maximum profit.

And looking at games like CoD, Destiney 2 and now OW2 they all have grindy battlepasses but you can pay with real money to get the premium variant of it. The passes in RDO was never that hard to level up. What is strange is that latest GTAO dlc was like the last update before closing shop.

 

I think I had still to much hopium and copium when I saw, read about how EA and Bioware treated Anthem and never thought R* and T2 could do the same mistake but instead like Hello Games and Bethesda work hard to have a product to be proud of!

 

 

Hey, I though the same thing. I though no way they would screw it up like those other crap companies, right? I had such high hopes for RDO and even rode with a fun crew for a while there, but people just got fed up and moved on. It just never worked right.  Even now I came back to for a bit and ran right into some new bug at the stables. Had to exit to the dash and just have not bothered loading it up again since then.

 

I don't have too much hope right now for GTA6 and whatever online ends up being. Rockstar is just not the same company. RDR2 I think will be their last great game. SP I mean. I still play that on PC with a bunch mods that really flesh out the SP experience. I can only hope that they give us solo/invite only lobbies in RDO at some point. I mean, they just did with GTAO in the sense that you can do all business stuff in solo now.  So why not RDO? The game works a lot better with low player counts anyway.

[stag3coach2]

On 9/6/2022 at 1:15 PM, Calvaine said:

I wouldn't count out the possibility of single player DLC just yet, but I'm certainly not getting my hopes up.

 

 

Dreaming is free they say

[jazzbone]

I purchased RDR2 2 weeks after release and started the online a second time about Jan 1, 2019. I have not finished chapter 2, but played online almost daily in 2019 and 2020. I have over 2,000 gold from doing daily challenges.

Overall from the beginning there was no vibe that RDR2 would get single player dlc, and from my experience online was abandoned when released. Abandoned in the sense that R* wished they would have never had the online mode. It took a year just to fix camps and animal spawning bugs.

The reason I played daily was because I loved it when it worked as it is supposed to. That was possible by tricking into or just getting into a solo lobby.

A year or so ago public lobby sizes becames small, 8-10 or less, and online worked well unlike in lobbies of 18-20 or more that did not work well. Small lobby= animals, large lobby few or no animals. So R* fixed the small lobbies to be large again, fixed solo lobby tricks, and continued to refuse an option for solo/private lobby which should have been an option when released.

My last online play was about 6 months ago. I used the mtu method for a solo lobby. My camp was where i left it, animals except gators spawned well, and had no boneheads messing with me.

[Nerfgoth]

On 9/15/2022 at 10:23 PM, jazzbone said:

A year or so ago public lobby sizes becames small, 8-10 or less, and online worked well unlike in lobbies of 18-20 or more that did not work well. Small lobby= animals, large lobby few or no animals. So R* fixed the small lobbies to be large again, fixed solo lobby tricks, and continued to refuse an option for solo/private lobby which should have been an option when released.

 

That was how they "fixed" the issue with encounters and animals not working as it suppose to do. Doing the mtu stuff is just annoying. If you have a batch of shine ready to go it will just pop up notify that it is ready. The match maker or lobby finder just will go bananas.....

 

 

Not adding private lobby and not fixing issues with mod users made big content creators not getting aboard and do content for the game. And that made people not jumping over from GTAO. Just watch some of the Professional streams where he gets stream sniped and are forced to do glitch lobbies.

[Pistol Bobcat]

On 9/6/2022 at 12:15 PM, Calvaine said:

I wouldn't count out the possibility of single player DLC just yet, but I'm certainly not getting my hopes up.

 

See an Undead Nightmare 2 would've been a frickin license to print money, another epic zombie spin off with flaming horses and Aztec gods with that huuuuuge map, maybe even Mexico finally added too.

 

But nope, they tried selling clown costumes for gold bars and when that didn't work just gave up.

Edited September 17 by Pistol Bobcat

[Nerfgoth]

18 minutes ago, Pistol Bobcat said:

 

See an Undead Nightmare 2 would've been a frickin license to print money, another epic zombie spin off with flaming horses and Aztec gods with that huuuuuge map, maybe even Mexico finally added too.

 

But nope, they tried selling clown costumes for gold bars and when that didn't work just gave up.

 

The two Halloween events we got was just lame..... People was asking for zombies or a light version off Undead Nightmare.... Instead the did all the cool things for GTAO instead... Feels just like the suggestion page for RDO was a front for a GTAO suggestion page.....

[williamhcarlton]

Reply to thread topic: no, that's hysterical. 

[Nerfgoth]

With the leaks and people going all nuts in the hype train, I´m just thinking is this it? The reason for shelving RDO..... No new city and probably better graphic than RDR2.... And online still have p2p system......

[Direwrath]

11 hours ago, Nerfgoth said:

With the leaks and people going all nuts in the hype train, I´m just thinking is this it? The reason for shelving RDO..... No new city and probably better graphic than RDR2.... And online still have p2p system......

I saw the videos, and they threw it all away for that!?  It might be me but the graphics hardly look much different, the character animations seem to move the same, and the map is just Vice City modernized?

The reflections are a bit softer, the sky has a better look, and the raytracing is finer, but that character that they showed still looked GTA5?

Despite my frustration initially I really was expecting more from them in the end, I mean if you're going to toss all of your already viable work to the side just for one game you really got to bring something huge to the table. If those leaks are legitimate, either the game is still a few years off from being released because it still looks flat, or it's not the true game and all of that is a farce.

It seems like it could be the latter because if that is the actual game, wow.

[Direwrath]

On 9/17/2022 at 7:31 AM, Nerfgoth said:

The two Halloween events we got was just lame..... People was asking for zombies or a light version off Undead Nightmare.... Instead the did all the cool things for GTAO instead... Feels just like the suggestion page for RDO was a front for a GTAO suggestion page.....

I had fun with the Christine inspired hell car, just think of how fun it would have been to have an equivalent in RDO.

Could have been akin to Ghost Rider hunting us down and forcing us to repent for our characters' sins. 

 

 

 

 

[Nerfgoth]

10 hours ago, Direwrath said:

I saw the videos, and they threw it all away for that!?  It might be me but the graphics hardly look much different, the character animations seem to move the same, and the map is just Vice City modernized?

The reflections are a bit softer, the sky has a better look, and the raytracing is finer, but that character that they showed still looked GTA5?

Despite my frustration initially I really was expecting more from them in the end, I mean if you're going to toss all of your already viable work to the side just for one game you really got to bring something huge to the table. If those leaks are legitimate, either the game is still a few years off from being released because it still looks flat, or it's not the true game and all of that is a farce.

It seems like it could be the latter because if that is the actual game, wow.

 

I know why the graphic looks like gta on the ps4.... They haven´t polished it yet so where did all the RDO devs go? Don´t know if you heard about the youtube channel Corridor Crew.... They show animation and other stuff how it is done. So I´m back asking where did they put all the RDO devs who stayed?

[Sarcasm83]

Yeah seems it didn't make them enough millions for them to care to keep it going.

[Direwrath]

11 hours ago, Nerfgoth said:

 

I know why the graphic looks like gta on the ps4.... They haven´t polished it yet so where did all the RDO devs go? Don´t know if you heard about the youtube channel Corridor Crew.... They show animation and other stuff how it is done. So I´m back asking where did they put all the RDO devs who stayed?

Exactly!

RDR2 has amazing graphics, if they took even a few of those RDR workers to do graphics one would think that the game would look better?

After how long they have "supposedly" been working on it would look a bit cleaner and well rounded if they had their best teams going at it.

So if that isn't the case? Why steal them away from one game in the first place?

 

For the sake of the players who are truly excited for GTA6, I do hope that they get a better product in the end than what was shown. Because that level of disappointment, after the sacrifice of two well loved installments, is not going to be easy to digest.

 

I am trying so hard not to sour the excitement for the new game, and I've been really trying not to dismiss the game so harshly, but from what we are going to lose and have lost because of this new shiny GTA. I do think us avid RDO players have a right to be critical by what we've seen in those leaks.

 

[Nerfgoth]

@Direwrath What I meant was that a lot of animation today is motion capture. And according to Tez2 there are only security updates in the pipeline thus far and no bugfixes. What I´m getting to is that with the game (GTAVI) being in pre-alpha testing they could start move some devs and artists back to RDO.

 

What I could see there was only one mission leaked and there they tested out animations and AI interaction and bug fixes. Some speculated that latest stuff leaked was from 2021.

[Direwrath]

18 hours ago, Nerfgoth said:

@Direwrath What I meant was that a lot of animation today is motion capture. And according to Tez2 there are only security updates in the pipeline thus far and no bugfixes. What I´m getting to is that with the game (GTAVI) being in pre-alpha testing they could start move some devs and artists back to RDO.

 

What I could see there was only one mission leaked and there they tested out animations and AI interaction and bug fixes. Some speculated that latest stuff leaked was from 2021.

I doubt they will move anyone back to RDO that aren't there to just monitor the servers and release already existing content for short term special events.

GTAO will probably be getting more love, that's where I believe they will put all of their creative staff. 

Me, I have a hard time thinking that anyone at R* has cared about RDO in a long time, they just didn't want to anger their players too soon hoping that GTAVI would satiate any frustration that came from it all.

 

 

[Bigglo145]

Does a bear sh*t in the woods?