A physical copy of Red Dead Redemption for Nintendo Switch 2 showed up on Vinted, the UK-based secondhand marketplace, on April 22, 2026.
Within an hour of the listing going live, someone bought it for £13.83 in Lincoln, England. The retail price, when the game officially launches on May 7, will be £34.99. Both the price and location are peculiar. It’s lower than expected, and it happened in the same city where Rockstar Lincoln, the company’s dedicated quality assurance and localization studio, is based.
This could be a coincidence. It could also be someone who works at or near a distribution warehouse that handles Rockstar product, getting their hands on stock that was shipped early, or it could be someone connected to Rockstar’s Lincoln QA studio selling a copy they were not supposed to have. We do not know. Nobody has confirmed anything. However, you can’t just ignore the overlap between the seller’s location and Rockstar’s QA hub.
Lincoln is not a massive city. It has a population of roughly 100,000. The probability of a random Vinted user in Lincoln independently acquiring a pre-release Rockstar product, from a studio that Rockstar operates in Lincoln specifically for QA and localization purposes, is not zero.
Read dead 1 Switch 2 physical edition found out in the wild
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If the copy did originate from someone connected to Rockstar’s Lincoln studio, the sale itself is a breach of NDA and potentially a termination-level offense. Rockstar is not a company known for leniency when it comes to internal leaks. A Vinted listing for a pre-release physical copy is obviously not the same scale of leak, but Rockstar’s legal and security teams have historically treated any unauthorized distribution of unreleased material as a serious internal matter.
With that said, the photos from the Vinted listing, which was pulled shortly after the sale, confirm what we reported last week: the Switch 2 physical edition of Red Dead Redemption is a code-in-box release. The box art includes the text “Download Code Only” with a secondary line confirming “Cartridge Not Included.”
What makes this particularly frustrating is that the original Switch version of Red Dead Redemption, which launched in 2023, shipped on an actual cartridge. The game is approximately 12 GB, and Switch 2 cartridges support significantly larger capacities than the original Switch format. There is no technical reason why this game could not fit on a cartridge other than cost-cutting.
The game officially launches in physical form on May 7. Two weeks from now. This Vinted sale changes nothing about the release itself, but it does confirm, with photographic evidence, that the Switch 2 code-in-box format is a box that tells you on its own cover that there is no cartridge inside. For anyone hoping Rockstar would reverse course on the code-in-box decision, the printed packaging kills any hope of that happening.
Our recommendation? Buy the original Switch cartridge. It is the better product.
We can only hope the eventual backlash to this is enough to make Rockstar and Take-Two invest in an actual physical release for when Red Dead Redemption 2 is finally re-released.
