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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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On the one hand, this is bullshit. A 14 y/o game shouldn’t cost more than its successor. On the other hand, I remember reading, the reason for RDR having never been released for pc (until now) was that the version of the RAGE engine they used was based on the one from GTA IV but severely modified with features that were originally meant for the version of the engine that would ultimately power GTA V. Those modifications apparently weren’t documented particularly well, making it unprofitably difficult to port to PC at the time. So my guess is, that the steep price isn’t just corporate greed but to some extent actually for a lot of work making sense of a 14 year old frankenstein monster of an engine and getting it to work well on modern architectures.
If they only released RDR on PS3, this explanation might make sense as the engine would be heavily optimised for PS3. But they also released on Xbox 360, which is the closest console platform to Windows in terms of architecture. It wouldn't have been that expensive to port.
I think there must be a degree of truth to the spaghetti code backstory, otherwise Rockstar would've just ported it already and raked in the cash
The one thing that could cause serious porting pain would be the need to support high/variable frame rates. That could require a whole bunch of code to be refactored.
To windows, sure. But the 360 and PS3 have PowerPC processors while PCs and modern consoles have a very different architecture (x86). And porting to that is more effort.
That applies to all ports from PS3 then, doesn't it?
Of course. But usually you’re not porting 14 y/o spaghetti code