Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition includes “Lost in Nightmares” and another campaign-expansion episode, “Desperate Escape”, where players control Josh Stone and Jill Valentine as they assist Chris and Sheva. The edition also includes the previously released Versus mode, four new costumes and an alternate Mercenaries mode with eight new playable characters, new items and maps. Like Alternative Edition, Gold Edition supports the PlayStation Move accessory with a patch released on September 14, 2010.

In addition to Gold Edition both episodes and costume packs are available as DLC, with two of the eight new Mercenaries Reunion characters bundled with each downloadable item; after buying all five sets of DLC, players own all content on the disc. This only applies to the PlayStation 3 version; the Xbox 360 version has no DLC on the disc. The Xbox 360 version comes with a download token allowing free download of all DLC, and the PlayStation 3 version has all of the new content on disc. The disc was released in the United States on March 9, 2010, and in Europe on March 12. “Lost in Nightmares” and the first costume pack were available for download on both consoles in February 2011, and “Desperate Escape” and other costume packs were released in March. On November 5, 2012, Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition was placed on the PlayStation Network as a free download for PlayStation Plus users during that month.

As part of the game’s conversion to Steamworks, Gold Edition was released for Microsoft Windows on March 26, 2015. Owners of the game from Steam or as a boxed retail Games For Windows Live can acquire a free Steamworks copy of the base game and purchase the new Gold Edition content.[47] Capcom also confirmed a way around limitations in the Gold Edition release for Steamworks which returns support for DirectX 10 and Nvidia 3D Vision as seen in the Games for Windows Live version.