Some may have snubbed their nose at the recent article discussing Halo: The Master Chief Collection successfully launching on Steam, and everyone was able to play. Granted, it was filled to the brim with facetious humor poking fun at billion-dollar companies struggling to manage the most basic of tasks, yet there’s an immediate justification. Rockstar has finally brought its most-recent flagship franchise title to Steam in Red Dead Redemption 2, well over a year after the initial launch on consoles.
It’s launch on both Epic and Rockstar Games Launcher (you’ll need the latter regardless) one month ago was plagued with many being unable to play, due to software decoding issues and platform confusion. Rockstar recently even offered free items in-game for purchasers as a way to quell the rocky start the game had.
Thankfully, after one month of additional PC development in a live environment (who doesn’t love pushing updates live?), the Steam launch must be tremendously successful and friction-free for the developers.
Except it isn’t, and it doesn’t appear to even be close.
The game is currently sitting at 332 reviews at the time of publishing, with roughly 40% being unable to play as expected.
Players report that Rockstar has the wrong email address between their Steam account linking to their Rockstar account, apparently triggering the DRM, and Rockstar support has not been forthcoming in helping. Others can’t even successfully launch the title from Steam, and enjoy using Caps Lock to inform others of that. Even others point to horrendous optimization that has been reflected previously, with 1080TI’s struggling to run the game properly.
Beyond the crashes, stuttering, and simply refusing to start, this simply doesn’t bode well for Rockstar. When you have rabid fans, it’s both a blessing and a curse. Blessing, as you reliably have buyers for products you push. Curse, as those fans are very demanding in terms of being able to play what they’re purchasing.
Being that this is the second release on PC for the title, and third platform release on PC, it’s also poorly received that there are simply still so many errors that users valiantly struggle to get working. It’s very difficult to see this as more than a calculated issue for Rockstar; they wanted their own platform where they could receive 100% of the purchase price.
Makes sense.
So both the Epic Game Store and Steam platform redirect to the Rockstar Game Launcher, so launching on one platform results in it being launched in another. The longer the line, the more variables you’re adding in that can go wrong.
It’s clear thus far that things have absolutely gone wrong for Rockstar. Maybe we’ll all get more items in-game.
