Rockstar’s Red Dead Online is causing a bit of a stir in the gaming community, with fans branding it a cash-grab for the company to make money through microtransactions.
The game features two monetary tiers in the forms of either cash or gold bars. A typical mission could earn you about $4, or potentially around 0.01 of a gold bar. In theory, you could sink hours into the game without earning so much as a gold bar.
Oddly enough, thanks to the weird economy in RDO, it actually costs more to buy a can of baked beans than it does to sell a looted gold ring.
The bad news with that is that in the RDR2 campaign it was a lot easier to bring in the dollar, but Rockstar hasn’t changed the prices of its weapons and extras. What could take 20m to earn in RDR2 now could take up your whole weekend, but the reward stays the same, begging the question – is it worth the effort?
It’s not just things like weapons that you can buy either, as RDO has unavoidable costs for the upkeep of your stables and camps, meaning the grind is seriously real.
People are now accusing Rockstar of creating the online game simply to rake in the money through microtransactions…
Although microtransactions have yet to be implemented into RDO, it looks like when they are introduced, it’s going to be to save players the effort, rather than to just get cosmetic enhancements.
Fans are outraged with the economy of the game, with lots of people suggesting RDO might be dead before we know it thanks to the skewed logic behind the money.
Red Dead Online is gonna be dead in a week if @RockstarGames doesn’t fix the HORRIBLE microtransaction based economy. Online isn’t worth investing any time into right now in its current state unfortunately
— TD Twilight (@TDxTwilight) November 29, 2018
Red Dead’s online economy is so broken, this feels like such a slap in the face from Rockstar. Who wants to spend hours grinding for cash just to be able to afford a few tins of virtual beans?! @RockstarGames @RedDead_Online #RedDeadRedemption2online
— shawn bracebridge (@_shawny_b) December 2, 2018
What do you think about Red Dead Online?