After yesterday's confirmation of Red Dead Redemption making its way to the Xbox One thanks to the backwards compatibility program going on between the Xbox 360 and its newer brother, it comes as no surprise that the game has gained newfound attention.
The magnitude of said attention, however, is baffling. To put this all into perspective, we're talking about a 6 year old game here. It was initially released on Xbox 360 and PS3, gaining overwhelmingly positive critical and fan response. It was supported by DLC during its run, including a large Zombie themed expansion. A GOTY edition was also later released, containing all DLC along with the game. It was being eaten up by gamers everywhere, who have been clamoring for a PC release and a sequel ever since.
With the latter of those two requests seemingly more plausible than ever before in spite of Rockstar's absence from E3, players were more or less satisfied. As such, the announcement of the game making its way to Xbox One came as a very welcome surprise. So much so that people went on a buying spree of insane proportions.
The Game of the Year Edition of Red Dead Redemption has remained on sale via Amazon all this time, though obviously it wasn't exactly a hot commodity what with the age of the game. Before the announcement, it sat comfortably at place 1544 on the ranking list of most sold games via Amazon.
Since the announcement, it jumped to place 26. The non-GOTY version has also jumped up to spot 55. These are massive leaps, especially for having occurred literally overnight. Eager fans pretty much instantly bought the game as the announcement went up, or so it seems.
Thanks to the backwards compatibility works, all versions of Red Dead Redemption are now compatible with Xbox One — the old disc you have in the attic? Pop it into your Xbone and voila, RDR. Same thing goes for all newly bought copies. Whether it is digital via the Xbox Marketplace or a physical disc, it will work with an Xbox One.
With massive sale spike is bound to catch Rockstar's attention — hopefully it will make enough of an impression to motivate them into actually throwing a PC port on the market. It would be a long time coming, that's for sure.
Red Dead Redemption will become playable on Xbox One this Friday, July 8th. Grabbing a GOTY edition off Amazon for $25 seems like a solid deal, since you're getting all the DLC. However, if you don't care for Zombies and aren't hurting to own a physical copy, you can always just grab it off the Xbox Marketplace. There is a summer sale going and the digital standard version is going for $7.50.
Red Dead Redemption has always been lovingly called "Grand Theft Horse" by the fans, seeing as it is just basically a GTA game set in the wild west during the early 1900's. Back when the whole backwards compatibility program launched, Red Dead Redemption was the most requested title — strange that it took this long, since literally all Rockstar had to do was say "okay" to Microsoft.
Have you bought a copy of RDR since the announcement?
