Red Dead Redemption 2 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S has been included in a major Xbox leak. Fans have been wishing for the existence of a next gen Red Dead Redemption 2 version and we now know it was in the works at least.
What’s happened?
Xbox and the FTC were in a court battle over the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Court documents for the Xbox vs FTC case that should have been sealed were publicly made available this morning. One of the PDFs included various unreleased games Xbox knew were in development and they discussed the likelihood of them coming to Xbox Game Pass.
Next gen Red Dead 2 heading for Game Pass?
One of the games listed is Red Dead Redemption 2. Whilst RDR2 has made its way onto Xbox Game Pass before, this was for a new version. The document states T2/RDR2 (TakeTwo/RedDead2) for gen 9 consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series X|S) should have released in Microsoft’s Q2 FY22. This was the period of October, November and December in 2022. The deal would have been for next gen RDR2 release D&D (day and date) on Xbox Game Pass.
Microsoft also noted they would expect Take-Two to ask for around $5 million to $10 million a month to be on Game Pass for approximately 10 million hours of time played in the game. This cost would be likely higher than what is being paid for Red Dead 2 previously as that was the last gen version released in 2018. A wildcard Xbox looked at was if it could come to PC as well via Game Pass. It was doubtful but could have made use of account linking. However, Microsoft listed the chances of the deal happening as very low.
You can see the listing in a table from Microsoft below.
Where is this next gen Red Dead Redemption 2?
The table containing these games were in an email sent between Xbox’s executive team assessing games for Xbox Game Pass. This email is dated May 16th 2022. Given that they expected RDR2 on next gen out later this year and we’ve heard nothing, it is possible Rockstar have cancelled the next gen release of Red Dead Redemption 2.
One of the most engaged games on Xbox
A slide on a leaked document showed the most engaged franchises on Xbox in 2015 to 2019. Red Dead Redemption 20th place. It had a total of 900 million hours played with 900,000 monthly average users with an average yearly play time of 231 hours.
Stay tuned to RockstarINTEL for any updates on this potential re-release and any other Red Dead news updates.
