Please, Rockstar, I Just Wanted To Play 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, Why Are You Sending Me Through The Circles Of Hell [Update]

I'm currently (supposed to be) on vacation and today, having recently finished up playing the excellent Indiana Jones, I decided to revisit a classic and play the original Red Dead Redemption on PC. I shouldn't have bothered.

After installing the game just after breakfast and settling in with a nice cup of coffee, I hit PLAY in Steam and was soon greeted by the sight of one of my great enemies in life: Rockstar's third-party launcher. Which courteously tried to automatically log me in, then decided it could not, because it was trying to use a very old email.

That email was my old Kotaku work email, a job I left in July 2023, so you can see that I don't play Rockstar games on PC too often. Even though I no longer had access to that email, and the launcher couldn't log me in automatically, I tried signing in manually anyway because I figured I could remember the password, but no dice: the launcher sent a verification email, which I would never be able to read.

So I tried logging in using my other Rockstar account, one I'd made more recently for my PlayStation 5 and which was tied to a personal email I did have access to, but again was met with an error message. Turns out I couldn't use a different account on PC because Rockstar had linked the old/dead account to Steam, only one account was allowed to do this, and I didn't have access to that account.

That's OK, I figured, I'll just change which Rockstar account is linked to my Steam account. Nope! You can't do that manually; you need to contact Rockstar support for that--complete with screenshots and a written statement you acknowledge that switching accounts will mean you lose all access to the old one--and let them do it.

So I supplied all the information they asked for, waited a few hours then, at 4pm--remember, I'd wanted to play this game at breakfast time--I got a response. That response repeated the instructions I had already followed, asked for a screenshot and Steam ID I had already supplied, then told me I'd never be able to play Grand Theft Auto V using that account again.

I was trying to play Red Dead Redemption.

A singeplayer campaign.

One I'd already acquired through Steam, and was trying to launch through Steam.

It's now 8pm at time of posting, and I've given up. But not before becoming even more convinced that anyone who has ever worked on the design or implementation of a third-party launcher on PC should be thrown into the deepest, coldest part of the ocean.

UPDATE 9:22pm ET, January 3: After nine emails and three different support reps, I'm in. The final rep worked out the easiest way around this was to keep the old account and change the email on his end to one that I could access.