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Rockstar apologizes for buggy ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ PC launch

The publisher says that some of the problems are fixed.

Red Dead Redemption 2 was one of the biggest console hits of 2018. After waiting a full year, PC gamers finally got a chance to play the gritty, Western-themed adventure when it was released last week. However, many experienced game-breaking bugs. Rockstar has apologized for the bumpy start and released fixes for many of the issues. Users who were unable to open Rockstar's launcher or the game application should be able to do so now, and some gamers who experienced glitchy gameplay should notice a big performance improvement.

Some will still experience issues for now. "We believe this is due to unforeseen issues related to specific combinations of Nvidia graphics drivers, Nvidia GPU cards and certain CPUs," Rockstar explained. "We are still currently working together with Nvidia to completely resolve the stuttering issue in a future update, and it may take us up to a few days to properly test everything and ensure the next update completely solves the problem."

To make amends for the headaches, Rockstar is giving away free downloadable Red Dead Online items -- a poncho, provisions and ammo -- to Red Dead Redemption 2 players from this week until the holiday season.

It's not that surprising that a high profile game has so many issues at launch, but Rockstar presumably could have delayed the game by a few weeks, giving its teams time to patch things up without missing the holiday release window. But it seems like more than ever, game companies are relying on a "publish it now, patch it later" mentality.