ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

GTA V had online troubles following Epic Store giveaway

GTA V had online troubles following Epic Store giveaway

Rockstar's smash hit Grand Theft Auto V ran into online difficulties over the weekend after being given away for free on the Epic Games Store.

In a post on Twitter yesterday (Sunday, May 17th), the studio said that it was experiencing issues "due to extremely high player volumes." In a post a few hours later, Rockstar's support account said that the problems had been resolved.

This follows Fortnite maker Epic making Grand Theft Auto V available entirely free of charge last week. The game has shifted more than 115m units since its launch back in September 2013. At that point, GTA V was only available on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but the title made the leap to the next-gen PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles in November of the following year. That was before a PC release in April 2015.

The game is still a strong seller almost seven years after its launch. It regularly appears in the Steam Top Ten even today, and was the best-selling game of the last decade in both the US and UK.

There are reports that Rockstar is – of course – making a new entry in the Grand Theft Auto series. This is apparently going to be a relatively small launch, with new content added over time. This will be the first Grand Theft Auto title made without Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who departed the company in March of this year and had been on an "extended break" since the previous spring.

Epic has apparently given away more than $2,000 worth of games for free on its storefront since it launched at the end of 2018.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.