According to Take-Two's Strauss Zelnick, the upcoming port for Rockstar North's Red Dead Redemption deserves to be priced at $50.
During the company's recent earnings call, the CEO was asked by IGN about the price point for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 port of the 2010 game. Despite only having the original single-player story and the Undead Nightmare DLC, Zelnick argued that $50 was the "commercial accurate price for it."
Red Dead's re-release was announced earlier in the week, and its pricing sparked some debate. Through backwards compatibility on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, the game and its DLC have been available for years on Microsoft's console and when combined, cost slightly less than the upcoming port.
Take-Two's finance EVP Hannah Sage added that Undead Nightmare's inclusion made the re-release "a great value for consumers. [That expansion] was a great standalone game in its own right when it was originally released, so we feel like it's a great bundle for the first time."
What is a re-release? A miserable debate of prices
Pricing for re-releases of older games vary based not only on the game's perceived value, but what's added from the original release. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition was priced at $60, for example, and featured all three original games, plus DLC that released during their respective lifetimes.
Current-gen re-releases like Mass Effect's or Naughty Dog's Uncharted trilogy tend to leave out multiplayer modes. But that gets overlooked because the single-player campaigns are strong enough to make up for that, or backwards compatibility (and other platforms like PC) allow the multiplayer to continue on.
The Red Dead series already has a contentious relationship with multiplayer, as Rockstar hasn't been able to make it into another GTA Online-level success for nearly a full decade. A lack of Red Dead Online isn't the port's greatest sin, but its omission understandably leaves a bad taste in folks' mouths.
Moreover, all of this just further highlights Rockstar's rocky handling of re-releases of its older, pre-Grand Theft Auto V games.
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