According to GameStop’s vice president of merchandising Eric Bright, the retailer expects Red Dead Redemption 2 to be the best selling game this year, despite launching quite late in the season.
According to GameStop’s vice president of merchandising Eric Bright, the retailer expects Red Dead Redemption 2 to be the best selling game this year, despite launching quite late in the season.
“Red Dead is going to be a top game of the year, hands down,” Bright told GamesIndustry International. “We had an exclusive Red Dead Collector’s Edition that we put up for pre-order and it sold out in a day and a half. I mean, absolutely phenomenal interest in that game. It’s Rockstar. Rockstar makes great games.”
“Part of it is that overall publishers have recognised for a long time that if they launch so close to the holiday season, Black Friday in particular, they’re not really properly positioned to take advantage of a key promotional time period,” he explains.
“You have to remember that game production starts years ahead of time, long before they know that RDR2 or anything else is coming, so they’re looking at ‘how do I maximise sales of my video game?’ And the best way to do that is to move it up earlier in the year. Therefore you’re not launching a brand new game that you can’t be promotional with around the Black Friday time period. No one enjoys that. So this allows them to have a great period of fantastic sales when the game launches.”
Curiously enough, while this is a quite easy prediction to make looking at the recent past of Rockstar Games’ blockbusters, publisher Take-Two said in an interview that it won’t call the game successful until it actually gets launched and become the success it wants the title to be.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is coming October 26, 2018 for PS4 and Xbox One.
