Make no mistake, Red Dead Redemption was one of the top games of 2010, and the eventual Undead Nightmare DLC add-on was able to make waves at launch. Of course, many wondered why the western-themed franchise moved to a zombie survival thriller. Even more astounding was the fact that the first add-on was free. Take-Two now confirms that the point to all of this seemingly irrational development was meant to combat used game sales.
"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 Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. "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."
Red Dead’s DLC was specifically designed to break the used game sales problem that many publishers face.
"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."
[Thanks GameSpot]
