I still remember the strange mixture of amusement and exhaustion I felt when I saw Red Dead Online being suggested as a candidate for Steam’s “Labor of Love” award. It was late 2022, and the nomination felt completely detached from the reality I had been living as an online cowboy for years. I had watched that beautiful, dusty world receive almost nothing from Rockstar while its most loyal players fought to keep the experience alive. The suggestion should have been a small piece of good news, but instead it felt like a cruel joke.

Red Dead Online launched in 2018 alongside the critically acclaimed Red Dead Redemption 2, and for a while it seemed full of possibility. Rockstar had already built a hugely successful online model with Grand Theft Auto Online, so many of us expected the western counterpart to receive similar attention. But the years that followed showed a very different pattern. Rockstar kept pouring resources into Grand Theft Auto Online, while Red Dead Online often felt like an afterthought. By 2022, there had been no significant updates for the game, and the community had grown restless.

Steam’s “Labor of Love” award is supposed to recognize developers who continue nurturing and supporting their games with new content over time. Grand Theft Auto V had won it in 2018 and 2019, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive took the honor in 2020. Those games had years of steady care behind them. Red Dead Online, by contrast, had become a symbol of abandonment for many players. When Redditor okrtaidersx spotted the nomination suggestion, the reaction was immediate and sarcastic. Players were encouraged to vote, but the encouragement was wrapped in mockery.

The anger was not about the game itself. Red Dead Online could be gorgeous, atmospheric, and genuinely fun when it worked. What infuriated players was the gap between Steam’s language about “continuing to nurture and support” a title and the reality of Rockstar’s silence. It was as if the storefront had not noticed that the game had been left to wither while its player base begged for any meaningful update.

Despite Rockstar’s official lack of support, the Red Dead community worked hard to preserve the game. Modders introduced visual improvements and new gameplay mechanics through projects like Vestiga, overhauling laws, weather systems, and population AI. These efforts kept the single-player and online experience feeling more alive than Rockstar had managed in recent years. The fan community also organized events to fill the content void, and many of them became genuinely popular.

At one point, players used an unofficial event to openly criticize Rockstar by holding a funeral for Red Dead Online. The gathering commemorated a full year of little-to-no major updates, and it followed a similar protest in 2020 when players had donned clown costumes during an earlier content drought. These moments were both funny and sad, because they showed how much people still cared about a game that seemed to have been left behind.

Rockstar later issued a statement around the time of the funeral event, informing fans that the company would be focusing on the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 instead of providing major updates for Red Dead Online. For many of us, that was the final confirmation of what we already suspected. The Steam nomination then added further insult to an already wounded fanbase. Being asked to celebrate a developer for its ongoing care felt disconnected from everything we had experienced.

Looking back from 2026, that Labor of Love nomination still stands out as one of the most ironic moments in Red Dead Online’s history. It captured the divide between how the game was perceived by automated storefronts and how it was experienced by actual players. I never expected Red Dead Online to receive the same endless content pipeline as Grand Theft Auto Online, but I did expect honesty. What we got instead was a nomination that praised nurturing and support while the servers quietly carried a community that had learned to survive on its own.