Red Dead Redemption on Switch Receives Very Negative Reviews
Since its announcement earlier this month, Rockstar's ‘Red Dead Redemption’ for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 has received harsh criticism from fans. Most of this came down to two things: the fact that this is just a one to one port of a 10+ year old game, and the fact that Rockstar are selling it for £40. Considering that you can pick up and play the exact same game on Xbox via backwards compatibility for £5 pre-owned, this is egregious. Its for that reason that the game is currently sitting at a 4.2 user score on Metacritic.
Image by Rockstar Games
Rockstar has lost a lot of goodwill with this decision- and what makes it worse is that, for some reason, the game is not launching on PC. The reason for this is unknown- especially considering how the studio clearly doesn’t intend to make any improvements for their ports. While the game runs adequately on both platforms, the lack of any type of resolution update or even an 60fps patch is an insult to fans of the game. It seems the message to fans with this port is clear: if you keep buying our low-effort products, we don’t need to put any effort in for future ports and remasters.
Image by Rockstar Games
The best way to gauge the community’s reaction to this whole situation is by looking at the user reviews on Metacritic. Most of these boil down to a plea for people to not buy this product- especially since the disaster of the Grand Theft Auto Remastered Trilogy last year. User rileyblog1 had the following thoughts in their review:
“$50? You should be paying ME to play this ancient port.
These companies are cashing out consumer trust and loyalty. It's time we stop helping them.”
Similarly, Kifflom shared their thoughts on the exceedingly high price point:
“Finally, the high price of the port is unjustified, no matter how you look at it, a proper price would have been $29.99 and not the $49.99 it costs. It is not advisable to pay this amount if the title has already been played before.”
Image by Rockstar Games
If one thing has been made clear from this release, its that nobody should be buying a simple low-effort port of a decade-old game for anywhere close to £40- especially when its a fraction of the price to play on other consoles. Unfortunately, its likely that Red Dead Redemption will sell very well due to the general market simply wanting to play the game on modern consoles. Regardless of the lack of care that went into this, it will be a success- and will, unfortunately, lead to similar releases in future.
