When I try to download Red Dead Online, a problem occurs.

[DuckyDom]

(Warning: This is long. If you do not intend on helping or trying to find out if this might be your problem then just leave.)

So, I've liked the Red Dead Redemption series for a while now. I've played the game on my Xbox One Series, both Story Mode and Online mode. Because I'm struggling right now financially, I wasn't able to get the game on my PC. So I asked my friend if I could play it off of his library to which he said yes. This was great. No problems so far.

I had finally linked both of our library's and the game Red Dead Online was there. Note: You can get Red Dead Online and still play it WITHOUT the story mode. Remember this. I started to download it and at first, I was confused because it said the size was only 1.22 KB which is very small and takes no effort to download. This was weird because Rockstar Games are usually 100-200 GB.

Shrugged it off and downloaded it. When I tried to load it, it got me to allow administrator permission to Steam Client service which is normal but then it comes up with an error saying, "An error occurred while updating Red Dead Online (missing executable) : C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Red Dead Redemption 2/PlayRDR2.exe".

This made me confused as normally, when you download a game, it usually has the executable in there. First instinct was to uninstall it and download it again. Again, not working. Checked the file folder and only a "installscript.vdf" file was in there. Now this definitely caught me off guard because games have more than one single .vdf file.

Started looking around but couldn't find out anyone who might've had the same problem as me. I had been able to download huge games before like PAYDAY 2 and GTA V. It was only Red Dead Online that was causing a problem.

Still, I wanted to see if I was missing something. I opened up the Rockstar application and tried to run it that way which linked me back to Steam to which it downloaded the same way and came up with an error.

Got curious and asked my friend if it was alright to log into his account. He said sure and I tried to download the game on his account. It downloaded completely fine, showing the game having around 150 GB.

Well, this lead me to the thought that maybe I didn't have enough storage. I had around 50 GB left. So I went ahead and deleted a few games which I had space for 160 GB. Thought that was good so I tried again. Still didn't work (on my account).

Started surfing the web for solutions and found nothing. Looked on steam forums to see if anybody had a similar problem. Nope (or maybe I didn't look hard enough).

Thought maybe my disk drive had a problem and needed to be defragmented so I analyzed it. No problems. Optimized it and still, nothing worked.

So now I was really confused. I had no idea what to do and since my friend had no money at the moment, he couldn't gift me the game. He also had no idea what to do.

Does anyone know anything that could help my problem?

[Falsus Te Deum]

Could be better to ask in the games own forum, those that might know is more likely there than here.

[Cathulhu]

What are your system specs?
And as far as i'm aware Red Dead Online can not be shared due to third party DRM (Rockstar Social Club account).

[Pringles]

its so sad that you couldnt download the game its really fun, i dont know how to fix it sorry