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The absolute swarm of players rushing to play GTA Online since the Epic Games Store gave Grand Theft Auto V away for free evidently overloaded the game’s servers, taking them offline. That’s quite a feat considering how battle-tested the multiplayer blockbuster infrastructure is seven wildly successful years down the line, and it should give paying players a vague idea of just how massive the throng of new players is.
GTA Online‘s servers are not the first real-world victim of Epic Games’ and series developer Rockstar’s bonkers decision to kick off the Epic Games Store Mega Sale’s offering of free mystery games with GTA V, as it almost immediately wrecked the Epic Games Stores’ own back end. The sudden influx of fresh blood (whose ranks are undoubtedly bolstered by children, hackers, and hacker children) are sure to transform the landscape of the already chaotic online battlegrounds and lobbies of Los Santos, especially since it’s following what is hopefully the tail-end of the Alien Gang fiasco.
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In a May 17 tweet, Rockstar Support shared that players were temporarily “experiencing issues with access to Rockstar Games Services,” with the primary (and likely only) services affected by the outage being the “Rockstar Games Launcher and GTAV for PC.” The complete GTA Online outage persisted for at least five hours until being sufficiently addressed later that evening. Although Rockstar didn’t implicate the Epic Games Store Grand Theft Auto V giveaway in the networking mishap, the timing of the outage makes it safe to point the finger squarely at the arrival of so many new players to the game’s multiplayer component.
Due to extremely high player volumes, we are currently experiencing issues with access to Rockstar Games Services including the Rockstar Games Launcher and GTAV for PC. We are actively working to resolve the issue and will keep you updated of any changes.
— Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) May 17, 2020
The issue impacting service performance for the Rockstar Games Launcher and GTAV on PC is now resolved. Thank you for your patience.
— Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) May 17, 2020
As evidenced by what happens in other formerly full-price online games like Destiny 2 that adopt a more financially accessible model, GTA Online going free even a singly week has opened the floodgates of toxicity and cheating the likes of which Rockstar has never dealt with before. GTA Online, for better or worse, has had a dedicated community of hackers that have sought to undermine the game’s greedy grind and fundamental rules since the game first released in 2013, which grew astronomically when the game was ported to PC in 2015. Now that the title has been made even more popular in the most literal sense by offering it for nothing, it’s anyone’s guess how bad the game’s hacking problem will get on PC.
Anyone who’s spent a fair amount of time free roaming in GTA Online‘s Los Santos and had trillions of in-game dollars dropped at their feet by an otherworldly being – or, most frequently, been killed instantly and repeatedly upon respawn by an unseen tormentor – knows that hackers wield an immense amount of power in the game. Epic Games and Rockstar undoubtedly had their hearts (and wallets) in the right place when giving an untapped market of PC players access to the seven-year-old game, but it’ll be other players who will bear the burden of an all-new incursion of hackers and cheaters.
Source: Rockstar Support
