Rockstar quietly released update 1.06, version 1.002, for Red Dead Redemption on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on February 24. The official patch notes, posted to Rockstar’s support website, read in their entirety: “General bug fixes and improvements.” That’s it. No specifics, no breakdown, no indication of what was actually changed. Just a single line that tells players virtually nothing.
Thankfully, the community filled in the blanks. Reddit users on r/rdr1 and r/reddeadredemption were the first to spot the update and start testing what changed. On PS5, the patch added music to the game selection screen, a feature that was previously only available on the PS4 version. On Xbox Series X/S, the update fixed a bug where pause menu audio would occasionally fail to play. Additional reports suggest that some audio mixing issues during cutscenes, including the opening cinematic, were also addressed.
Make no mistake. Minor audio fixes are fine. Games need maintenance, and nobody expects every patch to be a landmark event. What stings is the context surrounding it.
New update on PS5 this morning?
byu/InspiredNitemares inrdr1
Rockstar Games has reportedly been working on a native next-gen upgrade for Red Dead Redemption 2, and any patch appearing on current-gen consoles for a Rockstar title in 2026 carries a certain amount of weight. So you can forgive fans for feeling deflated seeing a current-gen console patch for a Red Dead title in 2026, only to discover it amounts to this.
When you’re waiting for Rockstar to finally give RDR2 the current-gen treatment, every piece of Rockstar activity on the Red Dead front gets scrutinized. A surprise patch drops for RDR on PS5 and Xbox, and for a brief, hopeful moment, you wonder if this is the beginning of something bigger. It isn’t.
It’s also worth noting what Rockstar didn’t do with these patch notes. The official listing on their support site includes “PC” alongside PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, but no PC update was actually released. Rockstar listed a platform in their own patch notes that didn’t receive the patch. That’s the level of attention the original Red Dead Redemption is getting right now.
The 2018 title remains one of the best-selling video games in history, with over 82 million copies sold, and it still runs on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S only through backward compatibility. For a game of this caliber, running on hardware that launched over five years ago, the lack of a native current-gen version is baffling, to say the least.
Multiple industry insiders have claimed that a next-gen upgrade for RDR2 is real and in development. NateTheHate doubled down as recently as early February, stating “as far as I know, RDR2 is this year.” KiwiTalkz has maintained that he’s spoken with developers who worked on the project. But NateTheHate’s claims have also been consistently off-target. He said it would come in late summer or early fall 2025. It didn’t. He said the ports “exist” in October 2025. No announcement came. Now it’s supposedly still on track for 2026, but there’s no official word from Rockstar, and given the studio’s legendary secrecy, there may never be one until the day it actually drops.
The realistic expectation is that nothing happens until Rockstar is ready. Grand Theft Auto 6 is slated for November 19, 2026, and all of Rockstar’s attention is directed there.
So, for now, Red Dead fans will have to settle for a patch that fixes pause menu sounds and adds selection screen music. It’s the kind of update that, in any other context, wouldn’t warrant a second glance. But when it arrives at a moment where millions of players are wondering if Rockstar will ever give Red Dead Redemption 2 the same treatment it gave the original, and GTA V, and GTA V again, it’s hard not to read into what’s missing.
Rockstar has the fourth-best-selling video game of all time locked at 30fps on hardware that can do much more, and this week it patched the other Red Dead game to fix a menu sound bug. The priorities speak for themselves.
