Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick insists Red Dead Online is no missed opportunity, pointing to 85 million copies sold. But leaked data showing 970K weekly players and $26.4 million in annual revenue from a game that received zero major updates since 2021 paints a far more complicated picture.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has crossed 85 million copies sold as of March 2026, making it the third best-selling video game of all time behind only Minecraft and GTA 5. Yet its online component, Red Dead Online, remains one of gaming’s most debated cautionary tales. On May 26, 2026, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN: “There is literally nothing about Red Dead selling 85 million units that could signal a missed opportunity.” The game’s community, armed with freshly leaked financial data, strongly disagrees.
What Take-Two’s CEO Actually Said
During Take-Two’s Q4 FY2026 earnings discussion, Zelnick defended Red Dead Online as “immensely successful and long-lasting.” He added a revealing qualifier: “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.” That statement essentially acknowledges the core problem. Red Dead Online can only be called a pure success if you ignore the towering shadow of GTA Online sitting right next to it.
Zelnick also praised the base game’s enduring appeal, noting that RDR2 sold more copies in its most recent fiscal year than any other year since launch. From a pure business standpoint, his logic is difficult to argue with. The Red Dead franchise has now sold nearly 115 million copies across all titles. But the question was never about the franchise’s commercial success. It was about whether the online component lived up to its potential.
Leaked Data Reveals a Surprising Reality
Earlier in 2026, leaked Proxar financial data exposed Red Dead Online’s real performance numbers for the first time. Between June 2024 and March 2026, the game generated an average weekly revenue of $507,193, equating to roughly $26.4 million per year. Weekly active players averaged 969,000, fluctuating between 704,000 and 1.29 million. Of those, approximately 15,000 were paying users each week.
These numbers are remarkable for a game that hasn’t received a major content update since Blood Money launched in July 2021. Most live-service studios would consider nearly a million weekly players and $26 million in annual revenue an enviable outcome. Several competitor titles with active development teams struggle to reach those figures. Yet Rockstar effectively abandoned the game in favour of GTA Online, which earned approximately $9.5 million per week with 9.9 million active players during the same period.
Why Rockstar Walked Away
In July 2022, Rockstar officially announced it would no longer deliver major themed updates to Red Dead Online, instead redirecting development resources toward Grand Theft Auto VI. The announcement came exactly one year after the last significant update, Blood Money, and mere days before the community organised in-game funeral events to mourn the game’s death. The hashtags #RedDeadFuneral and #SaveRedDeadOnline trended across social media, with tens of thousands of posts expressing frustration and grief.
The financial logic behind the decision is stark. GTA Online has generated over $8.5 billion since its 2013 launch. When your other product makes roughly twenty times more money per week, allocating development resources becomes a straightforward calculation. As Rock Paper Shotgun’s analysis noted, Red Dead Online “was essentially trying to compete with the most formidable player in the online crime simulation arena,” and that player happened to be its own sibling.
Where Red Dead Online Went Wrong
Red Dead Online’s problems started early and compounded over time. At launch, the in-game economy was widely criticised. Players calculated that earning a single gold bar took approximately eight hours of gameplay, while shop prices seemed calibrated for microtransaction spending. Rockstar eventually rebalanced the economy, but trust had already been damaged.
Several structural issues plagued the game throughout its lifespan:
- Identity crisis: Rockstar initially wasn’t sure what Red Dead Online should be. Early updates focused on PvP modes and a battle royale variant that almost nobody played, while the community was begging for PvE content and deeper role-playing systems.
- Limited spending motivation: In GTA Online, players collect garages full of vehicles, apartments, nightclubs, and businesses. In Red Dead Online, you need one horse. The lack of aspirational purchases undercut the monetisation model.
- Gold bar nerfs: The Bounty Hunters update in December 2020 halved daily challenge gold rewards and capped streaks, punishing new players while failing to meaningfully increase microtransaction revenue.
- Inconsistent update quality: While Frontier Pursuits (September 2019) and Moonshiners (December 2019) were well received, The Naturalist (July 2020) was widely seen as a step backward, and Blood Money (July 2021) disappointed most of the community.
- Communication failure: Rockstar promised “an ever evolving world” and years of content. The reality fell drastically short, and the studio rarely communicated transparently with its player base.
The GTA Online Shadow Effect
GTA Online’s extraordinary success created an impossible benchmark. By the time Red Dead Online launched in late 2018, GTA Online had five years of accumulated content, a deeply invested player base, and a self-sustaining economy. Red Dead Online wasn’t just competing for market attention; it was competing for resources within its own company.
The contrast was visible in real time. While GTA Online received entire storyline updates, dozens of new vehicles, and properties like the recent Mansions update, Red Dead Online’s content drops were comparatively modest. As a RockstarINTEL retrospective detailed, “when Red Dead Online was getting smaller incremental updates, GTA Online was getting entire new storylines, many new vehicles, and new properties.” The disparity made Red Dead Online feel like a second-class citizen within Rockstar’s own portfolio.
There’s also a fundamental audience difference. Most RDR2 buyers came for the single-player masterpiece. The conversion rate to online play was remarkably low. GTA Online benefits from chaotic, over-the-top sandbox gameplay that keeps players returning for absurd fun. Red Dead Online’s slower, more realistic Wild West tone attracted a dedicated niche but struggled to generate the same mass-market engagement.
Strange Tales of the West: A Brief Spark
In July 2025, Rockstar surprised the community by releasing Strange Tales of the West Vol. 1, adding four Telegram missions featuring zombies, robots, swamp creatures, and other supernatural elements. The update was the first meaningful new content in years and was warmly received, but its scope was a fraction of what the game received during its active development period.
As of mid-2026, the consensus among analysts and content creators is that Red Dead Online in 2026 will look exactly like it did in 2025, 2024, and 2023: monthly events, occasional Telegram missions, recycled Outlaw Pass rewards, and no next-gen version. Server shutdowns are considered unlikely since the game still generates revenue at minimal operating cost, but meaningful revival appears equally improbable.
Is “Missed Opportunity” the Right Label?
The answer depends entirely on your frame of reference. From a corporate perspective, Zelnick’s position is defensible. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a generational achievement. Selling 85 million copies of anything places it in extraordinarily rare company. The online component generated revenue that Rockstar wouldn’t have seen otherwise, making it a “supplementary benefit” rather than a failure, as Rock Paper Shotgun’s analysis framed it.
From a player and creative perspective, the label fits perfectly. Red Dead Redemption 2 offered one of the most detailed and atmospheric open worlds ever created. Translating that world into a thriving, evolving online experience seemed like a natural evolution. The early updates proved it was possible: Frontier Pursuits and Moonshiners showed what Red Dead Online could become when given proper attention. The decision to redirect resources meant that vision was never fully realised.
PC Gamer’s Harvey Randall offered perhaps the most balanced take: “I’d argue selling 85 million copies of anything is good enough, even if you never updated its online component ever again.” He added the caveat that not every game needs to become “a perpetually-maintained live service mill,” a sentiment that many players might grudgingly accept even as they mourn what could have been.
What Red Dead Online’s Story Means for Live Service Gaming
Red Dead Online’s trajectory carries broader lessons for the industry. It demonstrates that even a world-class single-player foundation doesn’t automatically translate into live-service dominance. It shows that player goodwill erodes rapidly when communication is poor and content flow slows. And it proves that internal competition within a publisher’s own portfolio can be just as damaging as external market forces.
Perhaps most importantly, it illustrates what Rock Paper Shotgun called “proof that following the GTA train doesn’t guarantee the world.” Historical success doesn’t automatically translate to future victories. Even Rockstar, with all its resources and talent, couldn’t replicate GTA Online’s magic in a different setting. That’s a humbling reminder for every studio chasing the live-service dream.
For the roughly one million players who still log in weekly, Red Dead Online remains a unique experience that nothing else quite replicates. Whether Rockstar ever returns to properly support it, or whether it fades into a permanent state of benign neglect, the Frontier will always be remembered as the game that showed us everything a Wild West online world could be, and everything it never quite became.
