Red Dead Redemption 2 is out now - but not on Steam
Brazen saddles
Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 is out now on PC, two years after it was first announced on consoles, and just one month after it was confirmed for PC. It's on the Rockstar Games Launcher and Epic Games Store, and will mosey on over to Steam in December. So here we are, one of the largest games ever released and it's treating Steam like a lame mule.
We've seen before how Epic can bag exclusives for their store, though this one lasts just a month and not a year. Still, they only take a 12% cut of sales vs Valve's share that starts at 30% and shrinks to 20% according to sales. When you're looking at the sort of sales that Rockstar's games garner, the value of that will be in the tens of millions. So even a month of exclusivity to their own store and Epic's Games Store could make a huge difference in the number of ivory backscratchers Rockstar and 2K Games buy for Christmas. You can't even wishlist it on Steam, yet.
The RPS video team spent the afternoon streaming the game on PC, which you can enjoy below like a fine can of peaches.
If you pick it up, you’ll put on the chaps of Arthur Morgan and mosey around in the final days of the wild west as part of a gang that can’t let go of its itinerant freedom. It’s a vast game, in a beautiful world. Though I played the single-player on console, the promise of multiplayer and mods is enough for me to make room on my hard drive.
And make room I shall, because the base game is in the region of 150GB, of which 140GB is Dutch’s speech files. I (Billy the) kid, but he does go on at length about nothing. I’ll be avoiding him like a rabid raccoon, but that’s OK (corral) because there’s plenty to do elsewhere. There are loads of bounties to hunt online, and I'm pretty keen to hunt collectables with the metal detector and binoculars if it gives me the chance to saunter through the scrub. The mods have been trickling in already, too. Just look at this, where you can be a cougar.
So let’s go through the checklist. Have you pre-loaded? Did you install the new game-ready driver? Did you go the whole hog and grab a new graphics card? Are you waiting for our verdict and performance review, which the lovely Castles shall deliver tomorrow (hopefully)? Or did you dive in, only to experience straight to desktop crashes and more?