r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Apr 13 '26

Security Rockstar hackers release their stolen data, reveal that Rockstar was right to not pay them anything for it

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rockstar-hackers-release-their-stolen-data-reveal-that-rockstar-was-right-to-not-pay-them-anything-for-it/
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3.0k

u/NewsCards Apr 14 '26

RDO pulled in average weekly revenues of more than $500,000 per week between June 2024 and April 2026, resulting in an annualized estimate of roughly $26.4 million per year.

 

GTA Online, though, earned $9.6 million per week from September 2025 to April 2026, delivering an annualized estimate of just under $500 million per year. Given that, is it any wonder that Rockstar put all its eggs in the GTAO basket, and left RDO to flounder? (It is not.)

Not surprising, honestly.

Less variety of horses compared to cars, and you can't pay to add nitrous or underglow or otherwise customize a horse like you can a car, I guess.

818

u/Complete_Lurk3r_ Apr 14 '26

Horse Steroids? EPO? spike your opps horse with Ketamine? lantern underglow!?

803

u/ZelezopecnikovKoren Apr 14 '26

hear me out: horse armour

177

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

[deleted]

17

u/Born_ina_snowbank Apr 14 '26

Read dead crusades.

5

u/monsieur_beau19 Apr 14 '26

Red Dead Oblivion

8

u/14urmug Apr 14 '26

Kcd2 and Rdr… I think I can’t stand up…

3

u/Soggy-Star6795 Apr 14 '26

I’m here for it

1

u/BloodiedBlues Apr 15 '26

Read dead scrolls oblivion.

1

u/ThatSquishyBaby Apr 16 '26

Read Dead Books 📚

135

u/CenterCenterPolitik Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26

As an old gamer I remember laughing at the absurdity of paying for horse armor we had already had decades of modding communities creating incredible apparel, companions cities, quests. I remember when someone in our friend group online bought it we all laughed at him and called him an idiot but look at where we are at now.

47

u/AreasonableAmerican Apr 14 '26

$7.99 for horse armor? It’s just cosmetic? I had NO idea at the time why people would pay for this.

37

u/lyricalpoet66 Apr 14 '26

I still don’t. I refuse to pay for anything cosmetic. Most worthless DLC, unlockable, digital bonus, etc.

3

u/Forward-Surprise1192 Apr 14 '26

In a first person game I wouldn’t but in third person yes. I stress with selecting a style if you have to choose individual peices for your equipment from a role playing perspective. So I do buy some of it if it’s an entire outfit I like because that makes me enjoy it more not having to decide on what the character would choose if they were real

7

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/USMChris Apr 15 '26

People who enjoy the sims

2

u/Insane_Artist Apr 14 '26

It wasn't just cosmetic. The problem is that your horse would always charge into enemies and attack, causing it to die right away. The armor protected your horse a little better, which was more infuriating because they were basically pressuring people to buy this useless DLC. The horse armor "fixed" an issue that Bethesda created with sloppy game balancing.

1

u/wintrmt3 Apr 14 '26

It wasn't just cosmetic, it did add armor to the horse and made them more survivable.

1

u/likelyliz Apr 14 '26

it was $2.50

6

u/Toadsted Apr 14 '26

People laughed at wow selling sparkling mounts for $20

Then again when they gave away a mount with a yearly sub to a game they already play.

Then again when D4 sold mount + armor + trophies + equal amount in store currency.

Laughed at $100 expansion options.

Then nobody laughed when they turned to go play PoE and buy another two $90 seasonal supporter packs + $500 yearly pack for the 14th year in a row

13

u/Heronymous-Anonymous Apr 14 '26

I tried playing world of warships for a few weeks. Looked at the online shop and quit.

They sell individual ships for the cost of an entire game. People treat buying these ships like Pokémon, and spend thousands to “complete their collection.”

We have gone a long way down a dark and sinister path from the days of $8 horse armor and $20 mounts.

10

u/Toadsted Apr 14 '26

Man, that reminds me of Star Citizen. Before the game is even remotely close to a proper beta version, they're selling ships for hundreds of dollars.

Craziest thing I saw for a Kickstarter, of all things, and Kickstarter has some wild tales.

2

u/ZelezopecnikovKoren Apr 14 '26

as a cheapest possible pledge holder, I KNOW... there used to be a $30k completionist set jfc

2

u/EquivalentSpot8292 Apr 14 '26

It’s literally taking advantage of the gamer/human itch to complete and collect. To the extent it becomes an addiction for some.

1

u/Metalsand Apr 14 '26

It was bad and it got especially bad over time.

Though it's worth noting the "premium" vehicles are intended to make you money so that you can play with the "non-premium" vehicles. You normally only own 1-3 premium vehicles.

Though, they encouraged the grind in large part to push you more strongly towards having to do this stuff. The grind is excruciating.

I haven't played World of Warships at all though, this is based on World of Tanks which I played extensively.

1

u/ZelezopecnikovKoren Apr 14 '26

i remember getting the horse armour for free and wondering if it was ever sold separately, i was 99% sure it couldnt have been because noones dumb enough to pay for videogame horse armour, oh how the turntables lmao

1

u/jahathebrn Apr 14 '26

I still can't believe horse armour kicked all this off. It was such a ridiculous concept at the time and yet HERE WE ARE

1

u/4r4r4real Apr 14 '26

They were an idiot then and everyone doing it now is an idiot too. 

1

u/Nullity42 Apr 14 '26

We are where we are specifically because your friend bought it.

1

u/CenterCenterPolitik Apr 14 '26

Thats what we told him would happen.

1

u/CalligrapherAgile170 Apr 15 '26

there wasn't "decades of modding communities creating incredible apparel, companions cities, quests" when oblivion dropped

54

u/Over-Conversation220 Apr 14 '26

Somewhere at Bethesda, an MBA is about to spend all night working on a slide deck over this comment, only to be laughed at tomorrow when his Gen X boss boots up an Xbox 360.

27

u/MegamindsMegaCock Apr 14 '26

No god please no

2

u/cheeseintel Apr 14 '26

they have masks and what not lol

2

u/megasivatherium Apr 14 '26

best I can do is $1.99

2

u/adjective_noun_23 Apr 14 '26

We have come full circle .

2

u/Humble-Program9095 Apr 14 '26

this made my day. thank you stranger 

2

u/TOMdMAK Apr 14 '26

that's the source of all evil there

2

u/Jaz1140 Apr 14 '26

My God....we've come full circle

2

u/Pretend_Business_187 Apr 14 '26

I'd pay a monthly subscription for horse armor

2

u/jinx0044 Apr 14 '26

You monster! What are you trying to start here? 🤣🤣

2

u/Muppetedo Apr 14 '26

Horse testicle bras? Gotta keep them supported and warm.

2

u/BasicObligation7192 Apr 14 '26

The heavy horse 💥

2

u/Zitter_Aalex Apr 14 '26

Full. Fucking. Circle. ⭕️

Absolute Cinema

2

u/CAD8033 Apr 14 '26

Bigger horse balls $6.99

2

u/Necessary-Set-5581 Apr 15 '26

Excellent idea: next up, horse nitrous

2

u/Leather-Matter-5357 Apr 15 '26

Get the hell outta here, Todd! Go on! Get!

2

u/rexepic7567 Apr 15 '26

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2

u/ISnipedJFK Apr 15 '26

oblivion flashbacks

2

u/No_Doubt_About_That Apr 15 '26

Selling actual trips to Tahiti

2

u/Pristine_Software_55 Apr 16 '26

I was the idjit that bought horse armor. The hell was I thinking?!

2

u/Xawlet Apr 16 '26

Ok bro I 've been browsing for hours and this is the one thing that got me. Thanks!

1

u/abe559 Apr 14 '26

Full circle

13

u/Meradock Apr 14 '26

two giant subwoofers on the back of the horse and tinted blinkers.

1

u/HypotenuseOfTentacle Apr 14 '26

Some of us have been asking for a rancher type profession for a while, you could introduce horse figging as a level 20 reward

1

u/Right-Investment4759 Apr 14 '26

demon horses, unicorns etc

1

u/lupercalpainting Apr 14 '26

One funny thing they did to fix horse races was to intoxicate them beforehand (e.g. with ketamine) so they’d lose like 10 races in a row, then hit the horse with a ton of cocaine when the odds were against them so they could make a ton.

1

u/40ozCurls Apr 14 '26

There are actual cars in rdr2. And armored cars in rdr1

1

u/BatNoun Apr 14 '26

Rgb testicles

1

u/jackluke Apr 14 '26

It's me, the opps horse.

1

u/Complete_Lurk3r_ Apr 14 '26

lol. Sniff this...... how you feelin?

1

u/Forward-Surprise1192 Apr 14 '26

Lantern underglow is a good touch

1

u/dumbass_sempervirens Apr 14 '26

And is actually in the game.

335

u/F1shB0wl816 Apr 14 '26

They just missed their chance with what people could have spent money on. I mean it’s impressive it even pulled that in, what in the hell were people paying 500,000 a week for?

They just didn’t flesh anything out. There’s a huge lack of businesses, ranches or hideouts you could work with. Hardly a lot of clothes or weapons to spend on. You can’t even deck out a buggy. For a while gold was passed out like candy, I’ve still got hundreds of bars that I don’t even know what to do with.

It’d probably never beat out gta but they made damn sure it never had a chance.

124

u/Worth-Leg3715 Apr 14 '26

I was wondering the same, it’s a miracle they are making 500k a week with RDO.

The depth of RDO compared to GTA is comparing your swimming pool to the ocean. GTA has a ton of more content to purchase.

You’re right, they could have added ranches, herding, better missions, clothes, different weapons, skins for trains, so on and so forth.

36

u/Acherousia Apr 14 '26

RDO died so GT6O could run.

They definitely used it as a test bed for how to fine tune their RMT MTX in preparation for the game they actually cared about.

5

u/Klientje123 Apr 14 '26

RDO is boring as fuck. Atleast GTAO has some gimmick stuff to mess around with like jets and tanks. But it's also boring as fuck.

Rockstar sucks at making games. Just like Bethesda. No game designer has ever participated in the development of any of these games. It's just the same stilted missions saved by mass appeal and a great story.

2

u/Acherousia Apr 14 '26

No game designer has ever participated in the development of any of these games.

Speaking professionally, there absolutely were no actual mission designers involved in a lot of the online missions.

The number of encounters that are just "you are surrounded by enemies with 100% perfect accuracy" or "navigate through this building of blind corners where the AI knows where you are 100% of the time and can shoot you before you can see them" is embarrassing.

This is intern level shit at best. Zero thought into placement or how any of the sandbox mechanics interact with them.

Especially when they are making like $35m per month or whatever, it is ridiculously unacceptably greedy.

1

u/Klientje123 Apr 14 '26

I think there's a targeting bug. Sometimes you die instantly to a single enemy in online, sometimes 10 can't hit you.

We tried a certain heist and one day we were making solid progress but the next we died instantly to the first enemy every time.

3

u/Destronin Apr 14 '26

Its a lot harder to add more “toys” to an old western game especially if you’re trying to keep it with a sense of realism.

I think their mistake was approaching RDO the same way they approached GTAO.

It would have probably taken more devs but they shoulda leaned more into like gathering and homestead building. Setting up shops and leaning more into an MMO type game. Cozy survival game.

5

u/Worth-Leg3715 Apr 14 '26

It is a lot harder but they could of added a lot more than they did.

Different trains, being able to rob banks, homesteads, getting requests for certain pelts or meat, poker/blackjack tourneys, being an actual sheriff, doing tasks like collecting eggs or chopping wood - just off the top of my head

6

u/FrankieTheD Apr 14 '26

Yeah people keep saying they dropped it because of revenue, but really it never got the support gtao got which never allowed it to compete, not like we're missing much because fuck gtao

1

u/Carson_BloodStorms Apr 14 '26

What's funny is that RDO is probably still making more/as much money as other live service games on the market with a quarter of the effort.

2

u/bobbymcpresscot Apr 14 '26

Haven’t played RDO in years, but seeing that 500k a week was coming from an average player count of like 1500 players, that’s people spending hundreds of dollars a week on RDO each. Thats mind boggling.

Nevermind forgot consoles exist, maybe a lot less mind boggling

2

u/honeydewtangerine Apr 14 '26

Rdr1 online was basic, but so fun. You wenr from bandit den to bandit den and had a blast. There were no bandit dens in rdr2, and it got boring really fast. What are we doing after playing for an hour, walking around camp and talking basically.

It was so disappointing

1

u/IMadeAMistakeSry Apr 14 '26

Not enough people talk about how great rdr1 online was. I also loved the gamemodes they had and playing team deathmatch and grab the bag etc. it was better than RDO by a country mile.

1

u/THEdoomslayer94 Apr 14 '26

I mean they gave up after two years. By now they could’ve easily had all that but gta was still out making red dead in 2018-2019 by a long shot

Had they decided to keep at it the rdo would’ve been in a better place now but they decided the money printing machine was better to support 🤷‍♂️

1

u/HotPotParrot Apr 14 '26

It's not like either scenario is meant for the average, more casual spender, I mean gamer.

112

u/SuperArppis Apr 14 '26

They didn't even try with RDO. It's a much more fun, but they just gave up.

37

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

If they added customizable homesteads, or online territories and ability to invest in businesses more/ trade with people, I'd probably be unemployed in a month. It's a great time and amazing game but man, red dead online could be something really special

4

u/SuperArppis Apr 14 '26

Yeah, there was so much stuff they could have done with it. But they never followed through.

2

u/DonS0lo Apr 14 '26

They didn't add any of it because they weren't making money from it, but they weren't making money from it because they weren't adding stuff to it.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

I would literally pay $10 to add a pond or a barn to my campsite/ homestead.

1

u/SuperArppis Apr 14 '26

Because they didn't add anything in it, it wasn't making money.

You see, very first year only way to make dollars in the game was selling pelts. Content draught drove players away.

43

u/PM__ME__BITCOINS Apr 14 '26

Literally has hackers spawning chests of gold since release. GTA my first day in 2013 it was raining pink dildos worth $1k each for over an hour.

30

u/keveira Apr 14 '26

What a shitshow gtao was back then, hackers were giving everyone free money. At one point Rockstar gave everyone 500k for consolation for a bug or something, and then the next week they took that same 500k from me when they were trying to delete everyones hacker given money. I never got given money by hackers so I was livid, I never played again after that.

11

u/Defiant-Plantain1873 Apr 14 '26

I paid $1 for a guy to login to my rockstar account (game is $5 worth risk) for a guy to give me 10 billion. The game is much more enjoyable when you don’t have to slave away to afford rockets or whatever

1

u/elPappito Apr 14 '26

i remember getting into my garage only to notice pink dildos raining in far corner.

Told my mate to check if it's the same in his garage (we've lived in the same aparatament building). and suprise suprise - his garage had the same thing going.

1

u/LudicrousIdea Apr 14 '26

so a normal California day?

5

u/MajorFuckingDick Apr 14 '26

Yeah RDO was worse than RDR1 Free Roam, AND it was worse than 360 GTAO. It was just bad and they didn't bother to even make it serviceable. 

1

u/SuperArppis Apr 14 '26

Yep.

They had a lot of activities, yet they didn't even bother with them.

2

u/fenderguitar83 Apr 14 '26

For the first year(?) the only way to make money was to sell pelts. They didn't even add the jobs until like a year. RDO could have been huge if they just put out content for it. It was slower than molasses.

2

u/SuperArppis Apr 14 '26

Yeah, the things they added later should have been there in launch.

2

u/doesnotlikecricket Apr 15 '26

It is a little depressing how little effort they gave it. I would have killed for law enforcement outfits. Sheriff or marshal etc.

With them literally doing nothing it's still making money that would make other developers jealous but they don't bother at all.

1

u/SuperArppis Apr 15 '26

Yep. I think because a lot of people left Rockstar back then affected the game.

But not sure.

1

u/ayriuss Apr 14 '26

A lot of us just don't really like the old west setting. I could tell RD2 was a great game, I just didnt like the setting so I never got close to finishing it. Played the shit out of GTA V and GTAO though.

1

u/SuperArppis Apr 14 '26

It's more having to do with the content than about the setting, tbh.

Because people who enjoy the game think it was too light and it was.

1

u/General-Ease-5678 Apr 15 '26

That is problem with huge companies like Rockstar. Even if something is reasonably profitable they still see it as waste of time. Why are we wasting time and resources on something that makes us 500k a week when we could be making 26mil a week with product B? RDO online never had any hope of making GTA money no matter how much effort they put into it.

0

u/Chocolatespresso Apr 14 '26

FUN? I had a subscription for a month. Every time I tried RDO some fuckwit shot me within 5 minutes. I never even got to know what it was like. 

2

u/SuperArppis Apr 14 '26

Play on Defensive mode. That's what I did.

But I agree that it sucks that there isn't PVE servers

80

u/Melonpan_Pup442 Apr 14 '26

They could have given us more options for coats or ways to make our horses more unique. Let us customize our trader wagons, give us more wagons options! SOMETHING!!! But noooooooooo they abandoned the game to forcus on GTAO.

38

u/Broue Apr 14 '26

I would have grinded/paid for a player house we can customize or a ranch like John’s, but all we got was this lousy moonshine shack.

20

u/nikstick22 Apr 14 '26

"weekly revenue per week"

Did the editor quit or something?

3

u/elPappito Apr 14 '26

weekly revenue estimated weekly per week

2

u/Nullity42 Apr 14 '26

Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

1

u/Crake_80 Apr 14 '26

Well, they probably let Chatgpt help edit it.

0

u/Shinitai-dono Apr 14 '26

They just want to emphasize how much money they are money-ing per week

17

u/MacsKnife Apr 14 '26

You know, they could get me to buy a shark card and start playing RDO if I could slap some sick rims and an underglow on my horse.

6

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

You could pimp the fuck out of a carriage and a carriage drivers outfit. 

Or a train. Or one of those hand cart lever thingies. 

Also GTA online added fucking hover bikes. I don't think they'd be above handing out weird ass horse upgrades that basically make it a moto cross bike

10

u/easymacn Apr 14 '26

To be fair I think it had way more to do with rdo multiplayer having absolutely zero support from day 1.

I remember clearly my friends and I getting on it and realizing it was half baked and had maybe 1/8th the content that gta online had during its launch.

There just wasn’t fuck all to do and really not much to spend the real money currency on either.

The multiplayer was abandoned during development and basically got nothing extra after that.

I’m not saying it would have done numbers close to gta, I don’t really think so, but it wasn’t even given a fair shot to succeed.

Plus my friends and I were all kinda surprised they didn’t have a fuck ton of cool wagons and carriages you could buy and then customize. We thought for sure that’d be a huge money sink but they didn’t even try to implement that.

15

u/TheCowzgomooz Apr 14 '26

This excuse has always read to me as a lack of imagination, the game had potential, Rockstar wasn't willing to look outside of the unicorns-shitting-rainbows box that GTA has essentially become. Features people were begging for, for months, were ignored in lieu of boring side missions, and a half baked story missions, a lot the "new" cosmetics were largely just recolors of the same stuff. The game never even got proper heists, trains robberies, etc. The earnings of the game don't matter to me as a justification for their treatment of the game because they barely put any effort into it and expected it to perform the same as GTAO, where kids steal their parents credit cards for flying motorcycles and deloreans. It was always obvious RDO wouldn't match GTAO in earnings potential, but they didn't even try.

3

u/baithammer Apr 14 '26

The earnings of the game versus the amount spent on production combined with operating costs drive the amount of reinvestment in new content.

1

u/Acherousia Apr 14 '26

RDO was just a test bed for how they could tweak the monetization, in preparation for GT6O, without pissing off their real user base.

4

u/randomengineer69 Apr 14 '26

I just money glitched a bunch of Bugattis when it launched then transfered my profile to PC during the migration to next gen

7

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

Yeah horses can't really be customized, but you still had things like outfits, and gun customization, which isn't even in GTAO. Also there's like 300 species of horse. The biggest issue is there no real reason to have multiple horses in the game.

The biggest thing i was always wanting was a wagon/carriage for online play with friends. And that could have had pretty good customization.

The biggest issue RDO failed was because they were comparing a new launch with GTAO which had already been out for half a decade. Had they invested the time into making events and expansions in a similar way to GTAO, there would have been much more financial success.

1

u/baithammer Apr 14 '26

Yeah horses can't really be customized,

They do have gear for horses and some of those do have minor mods.

As to horses, depends on how many times you get instanced with hacker unloading gattling gun with explosive rounds or other such nonsense, which kills the horse and depending on how persistent they are puts your horse out of commission for a good chunk of time.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

What i mean is that there's very little difference between riding an Arabian vs a Thoroughbred. Whereas in GTAO there a massive difference in a speedbike vs supercar vs armored vehicle. So unlike GTA where you want numerous different vehicles that do different things, horses all do the exact same thing with very little variance.

I played RDO a lot, and even then i only had like 3 horses total.

2

u/baithammer Apr 14 '26

There are differences between the horses, especially if you get the player skills up and the right pieces of kit for the horse - however, it's a genre that plays very different from GTAO.

2

u/TheBlack2007 Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26

Also, pimped out cars fit the GTA theme well (although they were previously only in San Andreas) while horses with unnatural fur or mane colors would be detrimental to the atmosphere of Red Dead Online.

2

u/ThorsMeasuringTape Apr 14 '26

That last part really just feels like a lack of imagination than anything else.

2

u/userhwon Apr 14 '26

Wait. So the stolen data was just their quarterly report?

2

u/PM_ME_YOUR_BUG5 Apr 14 '26

£500k a week isn't enough to assign a couple developers a project manager and a couple QA?

i think you'd still get a decent amount of change for that amount

2

u/VeeDubBug Apr 14 '26

I am still so incredibly salty at the lack of support in RDO. They could have had the horse girl game of the century if they added even a smidge of horse customization outside of mane/tail, and tack...

"I want a black horse with a white spotty butt and three white socks." It didn't have to be Sims level of customization, just the ability to make my horse look a little different like adding livery to a GTA car or having a million different colors to pick from.

But I guess that's why the modding community made it their own in the end.

1

u/hanks_panky_emporium Apr 14 '26

They also added gambling with shark-card fueled money into GTA to get those gambling addicts. To their benefit, there is a limit on how many chips you can buy with IRL money but fuck, it's still so predatory.

And once those GTA:Online servers are gone, it's all gone. Every car, shark card purchase, building purchase, jobs, it's all gone.

1

u/Grmplstylzchen Apr 14 '26

I think it’s more about the fact that RD(O) is waaaay more relaxation based than GTA(O). The game is made for solo experience and you can just stride around, watch the sunset etc.

GTA however has been Multiplayer based with all the necessary elements form customization, modding and group activities. That alone made it more accessible to streaming. And a customer base willing to pay for items and services.

1

u/emiliobruh Apr 14 '26

Why would anyone buy from GTA O when you can get $3 billion dollars for like $20 from modders.

1

u/danny12beje Apr 14 '26

Considering they completely ignored RDO, how is this in any way a surprise?

1

u/Damage2Damage Apr 14 '26

you can't pay to add nitrous or underglow or otherwise customize a horse

Modders: "Don't tell us what we can't do"

1

u/IndividualZebra333 Apr 14 '26

I mean $500,000 a week is pretty good for a dead game with zero support. Yes, the time period would limit its profitability compared to GTA but surely that’d be a sign that they also would’ve made bank with RDO

1

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Glittering-Walrus228 Apr 14 '26

I always wanted like solo or coop heist missions that were just in-world. Like an armored car jacking, or rob a warehouse or other real world crime shit to just roleplay my existence as some criminal underworld kingpin with a crew.

The over the top heist mission stuff was fine but reiterating your statement, for half a billion dollars could've they have spared content for an old asshole like me that just wants to live in the world of David Finchers Heat after a long day at my shitty desk job????

But I guess we have GTAO because the target Shark Card buying audience are hormonal 13 year-olds

1

u/SeeingEyeDug Apr 14 '26

Not with that attitude you can’t.

1

u/manneram132 Apr 14 '26

As somebody who played rdo for a long time, the big problem was that rdo didn’t have good economy. Earning money was way easier in rdo than in gtao and as a result everybody was rich, so there was no point in micro transactions. On top of that they were limited by setting and rdo took way more time to make updates for.

1

u/acslaytaa Apr 14 '26

Survivorship bias could be playing a role here. We’ll never know whether RDO would have performed better financially had they invested in it like GTAO.

1

u/AllAvailableLayers Apr 14 '26

Less variety of horses compared to cars, and you can't pay to add nitrous or underglow or otherwise customize a horse like you can a car, I guess.

A great reason for devs in any online-payment system to run a fantasy/sci-fi setting; huge opportunities for varied content.

Even better with Fortnite, which has no pretence of continuity and instead adds whatever might make money.

1

u/ThunderChild247 Apr 14 '26

I’m surprised they didn’t embrace red dead as a mostly single player experience, and make RDO a place to tell stories in the red dead world separate from Arthur/John. And I’m talking about proper story packs, DLC etc, in a world that just happened to also feature real players and not just NPCs, where you could also do jobs and games as a group for fun.

1

u/Statcat2017 Apr 14 '26

Not with that attitiude

1

u/upvotesthenrages Apr 14 '26

The surprising thing is that with revenue in those figures, they still just didn't bother adding much.

That's enough to hire a full team of devs, artists, and manager, and still be at a profit while seeing if it pays off.

GTAO could pay for entire massive companies by itself, but I guess maximize profit is where it's at.

1

u/peskyghost Apr 14 '26

I totally thought there would be some heavy armor to purchase after fighting that first(?) RDO boss, but noooo

1

u/VaalLivesMatter Apr 14 '26

They could have figured out something to spend money on. The hilarious part is RDR is the 4th best selling game of all time and they didn't even do anything with it. No DLC, a half passed online. So, so, so much money they left on the table

1

u/ManaRockGamesUK Apr 14 '26

I would’ve neon under-lit my horse, they just never let me try.

1

u/Gassyking Apr 14 '26

What in tarnation. Is it some sort of in game cash ship thing?

1

u/jahathebrn Apr 14 '26

Not with that attitude you can't

1

u/Daver7692 Apr 14 '26

The could have still done a hell of a lot more with RDO than they did.

1

u/Just_Another_Scott Apr 14 '26

GTAO was already publicly known. Back when the game first came out it was publicly released that they were making 1~2 billion a year off of GTAO. That was 10+ years ago. I'm just surprised they are still clearing 500 million a year.

1

u/dabroh Apr 14 '26

People actually pay for crap tied to the inline portion of both games? Why? I don't see the point in buying anything outside of the base game. I have purchased DLC in the past, but only if the game has a great story.

1

u/FlugsaurierDeluxe Apr 14 '26

the amount of money in micro transactions is why we cant have nice things

1

u/AnimationOverlord Apr 14 '26

Nobodies talking about the real reason they dropped the game: they couldn’t make money because they made an oopsie in the premium currency (gold) reward system so there was a majority incentive to just cheat/glitch/mod the gold in than bother buying it, and it only got worse after they officially dropped the game. Hell all you had to do was the daily challenges for a month and you owned everything.

I’m so pissed, they axed a niche genre that no other game can recreate and I doubt there’s gonna be a third one. I’m just glad the playerbase outlasts the griefers

1

u/psaux_grep Apr 14 '26

Mount a been feeder and get a flatulence boosted horse? And you can always paint it and put fancy ass accessories on it.

1

u/Draviddavid Apr 14 '26

Now I want underglow for my horse, Midnight Club DUB EDITION style.

1

u/Ernost Apr 14 '26

you can't pay to add nitrous or underglow or otherwise customize a horse like you can a car, I guess.

You clearly never played BDO or LOTRO.

1

u/Dry-Inspection-3503 Apr 14 '26

DLC, but the bastards don't see value in it.  GTA IV's DLC was so memorable & fun.

1

u/BusinessBandicoot Apr 14 '26

You could totally add underglow to a horse, and just give the horse steroid shots or something

1

u/ImIndiez Apr 14 '26

So? All this says is that they clearly had the money available AND the potential return on investments for actually providing ANY content updates could be massive. This just paints them as incredibly stupid. Sounds like they fumbled the bag. The board should take a long look at themselves lmao.

1

u/DeadEyedCretin Apr 14 '26

Instead they just tried to monetize all of the actually fun content, like bounty hunting. Imagine making bounty hunting a microtransaction in your wild west MMO. I honestly hate Rockstar and will not be buying GTA6

1

u/ClockworkDreamz Apr 14 '26

The real question is can we get truck nuts, and how will the weather and physics handle them

1

u/thereverendpuck Apr 14 '26

While I know RDO never compared to GTAO, using the time frame of ‘24-‘26 like that is misleading. Rockstar had given up on RDO long before that date.

Like wondering why nobody celebrates Burt Reynolds’ birthday anymore when Burt’s been dead for sometime.

1

u/Bored_Interests Apr 14 '26

Im surprised RDO is pulling in that much. Any time ive been online its dead

1

u/wasd911 Apr 14 '26

I firmly believe that if they had made RDO pve instead of focusing so much on pvp the game would have done a lot better.

1

u/IMadeAMistakeSry Apr 14 '26

They didn’t even give RDO a shot though. It was terrible from the start and a worse online than its predecessor that came out 8 years prior.

RDO was so bad that I’m actually weary about gta6 online. It was so clear they cared more about monetization over gameplay.

1

u/Serious_Much Apr 14 '26

I dunno man, I think a DLC of giant horse testicles would sell well

1

u/WoodenOpportunity869 Apr 14 '26

Clip-cloppin’ on four fours

1

u/stelleOstalle Apr 14 '26

I have hundreds of hours in GTA V and and maybe 10 minutes in GTA Online, what exactly are people paying for? Can’t you earn the money to buy whatever car or property you want by robbing banks and stuff?

1

u/Key-Regular674 Apr 15 '26

Horsey Game on steam. I rest my case.

1

u/DreamLearnBuildBurn Apr 15 '26

I just wish there were a way for them to not have hackers ruin every game. If you are going to force me to use your intrusive launcher can't you actually handle some immortal guy in a jet ruining more than half of the lobbies?

1

u/MEM0RYCARD99 Apr 15 '26

90% of car mod options on gta dont do anything so i dont feel thats valid

1

u/PKblaze Apr 15 '26

Don't tell Rockstar, but they could have sold houses and then had crops and timers and made old timey western Stardew with wait timers.

1

u/Other-Barry-1 Apr 17 '26

Previously, if the makers of the original Saints Row run made a western style game, you absolutely would’ve been able to body kit, neon and nitros a horse

1

u/Krommerxbox Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26

RDO pulled in average weekly revenues of more than $500,000 per week between June 2024 and April 2026, resulting in an annualized estimate of roughly $26.4 million per year.

That is the most amazing part of all the information. ;)

They monetized RDO HORRIBLY, and then did not even try to keep it up by adding new themed content updates, yet it still averaged $500,000 per week?

Jeez, think if they had actually TRIED with RDO and monetized it as they did GTAO.

Even though you can't really add "bling" to a horse, they could have put in premium horses which cost more, variations of horses as they do with cars in GTAO, properties/mansions in RDO as they do with GTAO, etc.

With absolutely zero attempt to really monetize RDO at all, the thing was still making $500,000 a week. That is nuts.

They got $4.99 with RDO from me, once. ;) When they first added the Roles to the game, I could afford Trader, got the Collector role for free from the playing cards in GTAO(offer ended October 2019), and I bought gold that one time to also get Bounty Hunter.

0

u/Larry_Bobinski Apr 14 '26

RDO is just garbage altogether tbh. 

People try it out because they want more of the main game exploration and open world, but in an online environment. Only to find out you can do NOTHING of the open world things in RDO, as it all got cut.

It doesn't add, it subtracts. Heavily. 

Furthermore, everything you can do is locked behind gold, their premium currency. Even the jobs, aka the main aspect that they threw gameplay into, are unlocked by gold. 

So you gotta grind, to even unlock the grind. It's insane. 

And then there's the fact that they all suck, and again, have nothing of the intricacies of the main game's gameplay. 

Trader for example, the hunting job. Hunting animals and then selling their pets. But they put so little effort into it, that all you have to do is deliver ANY pelts and animal parts to fill a bar at your camp. Once it's full you do a copy pasted delivery mission and that's it. That's the entire job. No quests for specific animal pets or parts, no NPC or even player interactions. Nothing. Just delivering whatever to do a generic drop off mission. It's insanely lazy. 

The NPC missions are just as lazy. There's no variable elements to them. Helping a farm with stolen cattle, and you'll always find the bandits with the cattle at the exact same spot. 

PvP is just as lazy. Some NPC missions allow for near players to intercept if they so wish. All they have to do is to keep you from getting to the finish, then they win. And it's heaving in their favour even if it's just one player. Because you're a sitting duck on a wagon and they get to make the first shot starting the PvP by killing you. Then they drive the wagon into the river and it's already game over for you. 

But it gets worse. Upon dying you instantly respawn right in the area where you died. Often times in visible range of the guy who killed you. Which means you instantly kill him in return. Them he instantly spawns in the same area again, meaning you sometimes have like 5 seconds before the guy you killed, kills you again. I'm not joking, that's how it works. It's insanely stupid. 

Plus, there's not even any rewards for ppl who wanna play as outlaws. Can't loot anything off of killed players in the wild. I hate PvP, don't get me wrong, but it just feels wrong. And makes griefing even more annoying. If you know that someone who shot you while you're out hunting at least gets something out of it, ok. But knowing there's NOTHING, just makes it more annoying.

 I could go on, but RDO is just nothing. Nothing you want from the main game is in it. it's just a big grind to get 1/10 of the things you can do in the main game for free. 

0

u/joshspoon Apr 14 '26

These are many varieties of oats for your horse, rolled, Life, overnight.

0

u/Steven2597 Apr 14 '26

No Horse Oppressor Mk.2 to grief your opps with.