Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked by IGN whether Red Dead Online was a missed opportunity. His response was immediate, defensive, and revealing.
So let me be clear. 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.
He then added the line that frames the entire defense:
I think if we didn’t have Grand Theft Auto here at our company, then people would just talk about the fact that we have this immensely successful, long-lasting online title.
To be fair, he isn’t exactly wrong. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the third-best-selling video game of all time. It just recorded its highest annual sales since launch, eight years after release. It joined PlayStation Plus in May 2026, putting it in front of 50 million subscribers. The game itself is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainment products in history. Nobody is arguing the base game was a missed opportunity.
However, Red Dead Online is an entirely different story. Yes, it was “immensely successful and long lasting”, especially compared to competition. It’s still alive and technically thriving today, after all. The only problem? It could’ve been so much bigger.
| Metric | Red Dead Online | GTA Online | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly revenue | ~$500,000 | ~$10,000,000 | GTA Online generates 20x more |
| Weekly active users | ~900,000 | ~10,000,000 | GTA Online has 11x more players |
| Spender rate | 1.58% | 4.00% | GTA Online converts 2.5x more spenders |
| Average revenue per spender | ~$35/week | ~$25/week | RDO spenders pay more per transaction |
| Last major content update | Blood Money (July 2021) | Ongoing monthly updates | 5 years without significant new content |
| Development team allocation | Minimal (maintenance mode) | Active (dedicated live-service team) | Functionally abandoned vs actively supported |
Red Dead Online is not considered a missed opportunity because it failed commercially. It is considered a missed opportunity because Rockstar stopped trying. The last major content update was Blood Money in July 2021.
The Strange Tales of the West update in July 2025 was a welcome surprise, but it was a single event, not a sustained content strategy. For four years, from 2021 to 2025, Red Dead Online received nothing but monthly event rotations and XP bonuses.
Red Dead Online was abandoned before it had the chance to reach the kind of success that Grand Theft Auto Online achieved. GTA Online did not become a $500 million per year product overnight. It took years of sustained investment, major content drops, and iterative improvements before the Heists update in 2015 turned the mode into the revenue engine it became. Rockstar gave GTA Online the runway it needed to find its audience. It did not give Red Dead Online the same.
Whether Red Dead Online gets a second chance through Red Dead Redemption 3, which Roger Clark says is coming eventually, or through the six remasters and platform extensions Take-Two has planned through FY2029, remains to be seen. RDR2 just hit record annual sales. It just joined PlayStation Plus. The franchise is alive. The online mode is on life support. Both things are true, regardless of what Zelnick says at a podium.
