85M Sold, Zero Regrets: Take-Two Defends Red Dead Online

"There is literally nothing about Red Dead selling 85 million units that could signal a missed opportunity. And Red Dead Online has been immensely successful and long-lasting."

That's Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, speaking to IGN, responding to the question that Red Dead Online fans have been asking for years: was it a waste? Zelnick's answer is unambiguous. He also argued that Red Dead Redemption 2 only looks underwhelming because it sits next to the single most profitable entertainment product ever made. "If we didn't have Grand Theft Auto here at our company, then people would just talk about the fact that we have this massive franchise in Red Dead, which we do and of which we're very proud."

He's right about the sales. Red Dead Redemption 2 recently crossed 85 million units, making it the third best-selling game release of all time behind only Minecraft and GTA 5, according to Take-Two's latest financial report. By any normal measure, that's a staggering number. But Zelnick is answering a question nobody asked. Nobody is calling RDR2 a failure. The criticism has always been specific: Rockstar had a massive, engaged online playerbase and chose to let it wither. Red Dead Online's last significant content update was the Blood Money expansion in July 2021. Rockstar confirmed a year later that it had shifted resources away from Red Dead Online to focus on GTA 6 and GTA Online. A brief return came with the Strange Tales of the West update in 2025, but that was a small gesture after years of silence.

The $500K vs $9.5M Gap

The revenue data tells a clearer story than Zelnick's framing does. After hackers gained access to Rockstar data last month, leaked figures showed Red Dead Online was still pulling in roughly $500,000 per week, nearly eight years after launch. On paper, half a million dollars weekly sounds healthy. Then you look at GTA Online's average of $9.5 million per week, and the business logic behind Rockstar's decision becomes obvious. Red Dead Online wasn't killed because it failed. It was killed because it wasn't GTA Online. Those are two very different things, and Zelnick conflating RDR2's unit sales with Red Dead Online's support is a deflection, not a defence.

I don't think anyone expected Red Dead Online to match GTA Online dollar for dollar. The settings appeal to different audiences, and the slower pace of a western sandbox was never going to generate the same volume of shark-card-style spending. But $500K a week is real money, and the community that was generating it got almost nothing in return for years. Pointing at the base game's sales total doesn't address that.

Zelnick also praised the game itself, calling Red Dead Redemption 2 "spectacular entertainment" and saying it "feels very up to date despite the fact that it's not a new title." He's not wrong there either. RDR2 remains one of the most visually impressive open worlds ever shipped, and it continues to sell steadily. But feeling up to date is easier when you're a single-player experience that shipped complete. An online game that stopped receiving content in 2021 doesn't get to claim the same thing.

The real frustration for fans isn't that Red Dead Online existed and underperformed. It's that it existed, performed well by any standard that isn't GTA, and was still abandoned. Zelnick can point to 85 million units all day, but that number reflects the quality of a single-player game that Rockstar spent nearly a decade building. It says very little about whether the online mode got the support it deserved. Reports of a Red Dead Redemption 2 Enhanced Edition releasing later this year suggest Rockstar isn't done with the franchise entirely, but whether that extends to meaningful online content remains an open question.