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GTA Online made billions. What will Red Dead Online do?
Here are five ways that Rockstar can replicate GTA Online's multi-billion dollar success with Red Dead Online.
GTA Online debuted in October 2013, two weeks after the launch of Grand Theft Auto V. A co-op multiplayer designed to complement the initial single player mode, it's been an unmitigated financial success. By mid-2016, the company had earned more than US$500million from in-game microtransactions since the GTA Online's launch and US$700m collectively from all their titles in a single year.
Creating high-budget games is a high-risk, high-reward venture. For most development companies, the work model isn't sustainable. It requires too much labour and money, with no guaranteed return on the investment. But Rockstar can pay for their creative freedom thanks to the revenue their titles produce. They can afford a richness and immersiveness to their games that other companies can't.
Take, for instance, Red Dead Redemption 2, due out on October 26 for Playstation 4 and Xbox One. Rockstar have spent a better part of the past decade working on this title. And based on the information that’s currently available, the attention to small details will be unprecedented. Just this week, Rockstar announced that over 200 species of animal would populate the open world; for comparison, the first Red Dead Redemption contained 38 species.
Red Dead Online will launch in November, and until then, Rockstar will be placing the single player campaign front and centre. Thus far, we only know about Red Dead Online what the brief press release has told us.
First, Red Dead Online will be an evolution from the original Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer. Released in 2010, the original multiplayer allowed for Free Roam in the open world, individual hunting challenges, co-op DLC missions, and multi-person competitive modes like capture the flag and death matches. We can assume that Red Dead Online will have most, if not all, of these options.
Red Dead Online will launch in beta to work out any lingering bugs before its final version debuts. "As with most online experiences of this size and scale, there will inevitably be some turbulence at launch," wrote Rockstar in their press release. "We look forward to working with our amazing and dedicated community to share ideas, help us fix teething problems, and work with us to develop Red Dead Online into something really fun and innovative."
The current approach – of working alongside the community rather than in service of the community – shows Rockstar are receptive to constructive feedback. So here are some things that Rockstar can do to ensure that Red Dead Online continues GTA Online's record of financial success.
1. Don't be a clone of GTA Online
To a casual observer, Red Dead Redemption could be mistaken for a Grand Theft Auto game, only with horses and carriages instead of luxury cars. But anyone who's played these game knows that beyond the 3rd person shooter, open world structure, the two franchises share little in common. Simply grafting GTA Online's conceits onto Red Dead Online isn't going to work.
GTA Online is a game of accruement – of committing crimes and earning money to afford an ever increasing number of luxury vehicles and yachts. Your ultimate goal is to increase your criminal profile.
But in the original Red Dead Redemption, the crimes were the means to a conventional end – to attain security, anonymity, and domestic bliss for John Marston, his wife, and his son. Red Dead Online needs to reflect these more modest goals. Compared to GTA Online, Red Dead Online should be more practical and less ostentatious.
2. Personalise the experience in more intimate and local ways
In GTA Online, there's little reason to lounge on the yacht you bought or to stay inside the beautiful home you purchased. The action is "out there" rather than inside. And besides, there's little one can do to customise the dwelling to personal taste; It's just "there," and whether you spawn inside a shack or spawn inside a mansion, the result is the same: you charge out the front door to commit more crimes and acquire more riches instead of enjoying the fruits of your labours.
Imagine if in Red Dead Online, you could develop property. Expand from a one room cottage to a two room bungalow. Upgrade to a flushable toilet. Buy a hen house. And eventually, have a functioning homestead that requires you to take care of it, maintain it, and treat it with dignity. In the Wild West, settlers had to do more with less, and tame their little corner of the frontier. It would be great if the game could reflect that ethos, in some way, shape or form – and have the costs of products and goods reflect the era.
3. Provide opportunities for lucrative non-criminal ventures
There should more career options beyond the criminal. What if you could be a barkeep? Or a cattle herder? Or a horse trader? Or a blacksmith? And yes, there have always been non-criminal activities in Rockstar's games. But their payoff is usually too low to be sustainable; you're inevitably yoked back into crime to purchase things that are prohibitively expensive
Even if you lead a double life – respectable oil baron by day, despicable train robber by night – it'll create some interesting tension.
Rockstar emphasises personal choice through their Honor System. But Honor can and should be more nuanced than 'Kill' or "Don't "Kill."
4. Reach out to the roleplaying community
Rockstar might consider reaching out to this community and asking, "What works and what doesn't? How can we make the player interactions more customised, whether through programming physical gestures or constructing interiors for more buildings?"
There's a clear subculture and audience for this type of experience, that's slower and appreciates the finer details. Why not cater to them as well?
5. Get tough on griefers
The truth is that a lot of these roleplayers left GTA Online a long time ago, as did other, more conventional players, because they were sick of being targeted by trolls, especially during missions. Or they found weird tricks and workarounds, so that they could be the only players in their lobby, and thus, go about their business uninterrupted. That a workaround was even necessary shows a systemic problem The bar for what's considered "bad sport" behaviour should be lower, and the subsequent banishment to the "bad sport" servers should be longer. Both need to be consistently enforced.
Perhaps there can be a designated area for unrestricted mayhem. Or maybe the missions can be sanctioned off from the Free Roam areas where this stuff takes place.
There's no easy solution to this. But messing with other people's good time, when they don't want to be messed with, shouldn't be a fact of life that everyone simply endures. Build the type of community that welcomes all players and more players will have the incentive to stick around.
