As Rockstar gear up to release GTA 6 (at least on consoles), spare a thought for Red Dead Online. The multiplayer element of Red Dead Redemption 2 had its steady flow of major update-carrying stagecoaches stopped all the way back in 2022, with its makers explicitly citing a desire to shift those development resources over to that next entry in the stealy wheels series.

There've been a few moments in the years since when Red Dead Online has looked a bit like it might bounce back to prominence, but nothing substantial in that vein has materialised. It essentially had a solid three year run, but failed to come close to grasping the reins from its older inspiration, GTA Online. In the eyes of Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, however, that doesn't make it a missed opportunity.

The exec indicated as much in an interview with the Ian Games Network around his company's latest earnings call. Stepping up to defend Red Dead's drawing power as a whole, Zelnick whipped out Red Dead Redemption 2's sales numbers, while insisting that it's online element has been "immensely successful and long lasting".

Then, he got as close as he's likely ever going to get in his current job to acknowledging the slightly more complex legacy Red Dead Online boasts. "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 massive franchise in Red Dead, which we do and of which we're very proud," he said. That's Red Dead Online's issue in a nutshell. It can only be looked at as an unabashed success if you conveniently ignore the larger outlaw whose trail coat tails it was attempting to ride.

GTA Online, since it got up and running in 2013 and right up to the present day, has made the sort of yearly cash that real world criminals would kill for. It's been such a runaway success that putting anything else next to it generally makes that thing look pretty pitiful by comparison. To filch players from GTA Online, Red Dead Online would have had to overcome years of sunk player cost back in 2019. Such is the way of huge, regularly-updated online games. They've got to fight to trap as many people in their cellar for the long term, if they hope not to end up on a publisher's kill list. Red Dead Online was tasked with trying to rustle the cattle of the biggest and baddest cowboy in the online crim sim space.

That's certainly a failure in Red Dead Online's mission to be the biggest and best online thing it could be, and it's debatable whether with more support and resources from Rockstar, the result would have been the same. I tend to believe the game was probably fighting a losing battle regardless. I also think I'm with Zelnick at least a bit in terms of not couching it strictly as a missed opportunity. It was certainly worth a punt and will have made Rockstar some money they might otherwise not have gotten. It's ended up as icing on a cake, rather than forming part of the dessert's uber-lucrative body. That's far from a terrible existence to have had, even if the players who've stuck with it this long might disagree.

The aspect of it that might keep a few Rockstar execs up at night on rare occasions is that Red Dead Online shows that the company following paths GTA has set out beforehand isn't a guarantee of runaway success. What worked before won't automatically work again, an obvious notion to any publishers not blessed by the massive and constant level of success and critical acclaim Rockstar have achieved over the years. It's not a strikeout, but it is a reminder to the high-flying home run hitter that not every ball they whack will automatically fly into the stands. They aren't too big to fail, even if that failure's only in comparison to lofty expectations built up by their own success.

GTA 6, long-pegged as a watershed moment for not just Rockstar but the wider games industry, is now slouching into view, carrying with it expectations so lofty they obscure the sun. Red Dead Online lies in its wake, a reminder that the road it walks isn't certain to be paved with gold.