$14.99 for a game carrying a 93 Metacritic. $4.49 for another at 89. Red Dead Redemption 2 and Devil May Cry 5 sit at #9 and #10 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart, and every developer launching a $70 title this week has a problem: their competition isn’t each other. It’s 2019.

RDR2’s current 75% discount marks its lowest recorded price, according to RockstarINTEL, and players have responded in force. The game jumped 65% in concurrent players to 29,720, per Steam data — a number that would be respectable for a mid-tier new release, let alone a six-and-a-half-year-old open-world western. SteamCharts recorded a 24-hour peak above 30,000. That’s not nostalgia traffic. That’s revenue.

The Numbers That Matter

Combined, these two games hold over 365,000 Steam reviews. RDR2 alone accounts for 315,289 at 92% positive. Devil May Cry 5 sits at 49,761 reviews with a 95% positive rating Steam classifies as “Overwhelmingly Positive.” These aren’t cult favorites punching above their weight. They’re AAA blockbusters with player counts that keep compounding.

The RDR2 player surge is the more revealing datapoint. SteamCharts shows the game averaging roughly 25,800 players over the last 30 days. The sale pushed it well above that baseline to numbers comparable to its December 2019 launch month, when it averaged 28,626. Its all-time concurrency peak of 99,759 came in February 2025 — more than five years after release. This game doesn’t decay. It appreciates.

Devil May Cry 5 tells a different story on the player side — 3,678 concurrent is modest — but its revenue position at #10 says everything about what $4.49 does to unit velocity. The game’s all-time peak of 88,735 came at launch in March 2019. It won’t touch that again. At 85% off, it doesn’t need to. Sheer volume at that price competes with full-priced titles selling a fraction of the copies.

The Uncomfortable Math

Here’s what should worry the industry. RDR2 at $14.99 and DMC5 at $4.49 are holding top-10 revenue positions against games charging three to five times as much per unit. You don’t land in Steam’s top 10 by moving a few discounted copies. You land there by generating real dollar volume — enough to out-earn recent releases with healthier per-unit margins.

This dynamic isn’t new. Steam’s seasonal sale economy has operated this way for years. But the gap is widening. As development budgets inflate and studios dig in on premium pricing, the back catalog keeps getting cheaper — and in cases like RDR2, the back catalog offers an experience that reviews as well as or better than anything released this year.

The question worth asking is whether these prices represent a floor or another step down. This is RDR2’s lowest price ever, according to RockstarINTEL, but Rockstar is already discounting its Ultimate Edition at 80% off. Will next year’s sale push the base game to the same mark? At what point does a 93 Metacritic title at $12 start to look like a subscription model wearing a sale tag?

Steam’s discount cadence has trained a generation of PC gamers to wait. The 65% player surge proves the demand was always there — it was just priced out. The same audience that skipped RDR2 at $59.99 is now generating top-10 revenue at $14.99. Demand didn’t change. The sticker did.

The Back Catalog as Revenue Weapon

Every publisher with a deep library watches this playbook. Capcom has demonstrated it for years — discount aggressively, climb the charts, let volume do the work. Rockstar is now running its own publisher sale across the catalog: GTA V at 63% off, GTA IV at 70% off, Max Payne 3 at 70% off. These aren’t clearance firesales. They’re coordinated revenue strategies that extract maximum value from games long past their marketing cycle.

For players, it’s the golden age of cheap classics. For studios selling a $70 game into this environment, it’s a structural problem that compounds every time another legendary title gets its deepest-ever discount. The old games aren’t going away. They’re getting cheaper. And most of them are still better.

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