It's actually a slightly bizarre story. Red Dead Redemption 2 was released in 2018 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and was unanimously praised, won every available major award, and sold exceptionally well. One would imagine that Rockstar would have been overjoyed, and most people probably thought that the game would follow the same path as Grand Theft Auto V with updated versions for newer consoles.
But... as we know, that's not how it turned out. They lost interest in supporting the game's online component almost immediately, and even though a PC version was released, it still isn't available on either PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S/X, which are now approaching their respective replacements. Oh, and no Switch 2 version has been announced either.
Despite this, Red Dead Redemption 2 continues to sell at an incredible pace. Since the last quarterly report, sales have increased by two million copies, bringing the total number to 79 million units sold, surpassing the combined sales of Mario Kart 8/Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at 78.02 million copies. This makes Red Dead Redemption 2 the fourth best-selling game of all-time, behind only (in order) Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V, and Wii Sports, the latter of which, as we know, was bundled with Wii consoles outside of Japan.
Everything indicates that Rockstar's western epic will surpass Wii Sports (82.9 million copies sold) in the not-too-distant future, and by the summer of 2026, it should be the third best-selling game of all time.
Rumour has it that Rockstar is finally considering releasing Red Dead Redemption 2 on more formats, but the fact that it has taken so long, combined with the lack of interest in supporting it online, shows that they still consider Grand Theft Auto to be their absolute main focus. And then it's not enough to simply just be the world's fourth best-selling game ever.
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