Red Dead Redemption 2 comes to Steam next week

Red Dead Redemption 2 launches on Steam on Dec. 5, about a month after its PC debut on three other digital storefronts.

The game doesn’t yet have a Steam page, but it’ll probably be full price when it arrives. Red Dead Redemption 2 uses the new Rockstar Launcher regardless of where it has been sold (whether the Epic Games Store, GOG.com or elsewhere) and presumably that will be the case for Steam as well. We’ve reached out to Rockstar Games to verify anyway.

The Rockstar Games Launcher arrived in September; it scans a user’s drive for existing Rockstar PC games and pulls them into its library, Steam titles included. Some gamers have groused about adding another proprietary launcher to their desktops, as Rockstar’s joins ones from Epic, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Bethesda Softworks on users’ desktops. A bug in the Rockstar Launcher — quickly corrected — had the unfortunate effect of making Grand Theft Auto 5 an always-online game.

We took a look at Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC after its launch on Oct. 26. It was … not great, starting with downloading and installing the thing, and including game-breaking problems like sudden freezes. Two title updates seem to have smoothed out freezing, which was attributed to a conflict with certain hardware combinations, but revisiting RDR2 last week showed a game still inconsistent and frustrating enough to keep us wary.