Earlier this year, Take-Two and Rockstar decided to push back the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 until Spring of 2018. This new release date puts the game in a release window that faces a bit less competition from other games and gives the team time to put some more work into the game.
While Take Two Interactive has full faith in Red Dead Redemption 2 performing well, they aren't putting it on the same pedestal as GTA 5. At the moment, Grand Theft Auto 5's Online portion has brought in a ton of money for Take Two (over $500 million), which makes it somewhat understandable that they aren't setting their sites as high with Red Dead Redemption 2.
Take Two Interactive’s CEO, Straus Zelnick revealed where Take Two's expectation are set with Red Dead Redemption 2:
“I don’t make assumptions like that,” Zelnick told Gamesindustry.biz. “What the team is doing is trying to make the best possible game they can, and if they succeed… Look, the reason, in my opinion, why GTA V has sold 80m units, and GTA Online had another record year 3-and-a-half years since its release, is because it stands alone in the generation. In every prior generation, there have been other titles that have clustered around GTA from a quality point-of-view. That’s clearly not the case now. If you are over 17 and you have a new generation console, you have GTA. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have shipped 80m units. Can any other title achieve that? It seems unlikely. Do we have incredibly high hopes for Red Dead? We do. But we are not putting it in the context of GTA.”
