According to our own Eliot’s taxonomy of corporate apologies in video games, compensation for screw-ups takes one of three forms: an effort to correct the issue, a generous but unrelated pile of stuff, or a picture of the development staff looking sad. Red Dead Online beta testers will be pleased, I presume, to hear that as amends for the messy beta launch earlier this month, players are getting a big stack of the second one, with a touch of the first, though Rockstar’s calling it a thank-you. Whatever, free stuff.
“As a thank you for your ongoing support, we are awarding everyone who has played from the Red Dead Online Beta launch through this Thursday, December 20th with a gift of 15 additional gold bars,” the company says. “As an added thank you to players who pre-ordered Red Dead Redemption 2, and those who purchased either the Special or Ultimate Edition, we are awarding additional RDO$ gifts” – those amount to RDO$100 for everyone, with an extra RDO$100 for special edition players and another RDO$1000 for ultimat edition buyers.
And yes, that means the store is now live. And as for the future of the game?
“We have been poring through incoming community input and suggestions and are working on updates for early 2019 to address many popular bits of feedback including some new anti-griefing measures in the works and other updates to improve gameplay balance. We are also working on lots of new features, modes and additional Red Dead Online gameplay content updates that we are very excited to share more about in the new year.”
Red Dead Online Beta update:
As a thanks for your ongoing support, we're awarding everyone who played so far a gift of 15 gold bars, and additional RDO$ gifts to those who pre-ordered #RDR2, or purchased the Special or Ultimate Edition.
More updates at https://t.co/DWg2RxVRfH pic.twitter.com/1eBxyXJLrk
— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) December 14, 2018
