Red Dead Redemption DLC Strategy Prevented Used Game Sales

The downloadable content strategy for Red Dead Redemption, which saw a steady of stream of add-ons appear for it, was devised to keep owners from trading in their copies, thus preventing the loss of profit due to used game sales, at least according to its publisher, Take-Two Interactive.

Red Dead Redemption was released last year, selling a huge amount of copies since then, and is now getting ready to see the release of a Game of the Year edition, with all the previously released DLC, next month.

According to Take-Two Interactive CEO, Strauss Zelnick, the whole reason behind this steady and quite long stream of content was to keep owners from trading in their new copies of Red Dead Redemption, thus preventing people from finding cheaper, used titles, who were then forced to buy new versions of the Western-themed shooter.

"Once we do the core development, which takes a long time and is pretty hard, doing the development related to the DLC in a high-quality way is a lot easier and a lot quicker," said Zelnick, via Gamespot. "And we can be very responsive to what the market wants. So at the time we put out Red Dead Redemption in May, we didn't even have a fantasy that we'd be putting out a zombie title for Halloween. But we were."

The Undead Nightmare add-on, which appeared last Halloween, saw protagonist John Marston engage in a special set of adventures, where Zombies invaded the Western game, quickly achieving impressive sales in that busy holiday season.

"The theory was, let consumers know there's a reason to hold onto your games because the bulk of impact of used game sales on front line sales is in the first six weeks," Zelnick noted. "So if we can get people to hold onto their game for the first six weeks, the titles aren't in the stores in the used game section, which means people have to buy the front line title from us."

Take-Two and its partner, Rockstar are set to make even more money, with the Red Dead Redemption: Game of the Year Edition next month.