Demand for GTA 5 broke Epic’s launcher, but the open-world classic will be a steal when it’s back up.
When last week’s freebie, Death Coming, became available Epic neglected to reveal this week’s get. Instead, they opted to keep today’s game shrouded in mystery, locked behind a thumbnail vault.
But, yesterday, rumors began swirling that Rockstar’s crime drama would be this week’s freebie. Then, today, Epic tweeted and quickly deleted a video announcing exactly that, a few hours before the game was set to be revealed.
Now, wild demand for Rockstar’s acclaimed open-world game has broken the store.
“We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store,” says a tweet from the official store account.
“We are aware that users may be encountering slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing at this time and we are actively working to scale. We’ll provide an update as soon as we can.”
I can personally verify that this is a problem. I’ve periodically checked in on the store throughout the morning to try to grab GTA 5 and have gotten repeated 500 errors. That said, I’ve seen some folks on Twitter complaining that they can’t launch their Epic games, and that hasn’t been an issue for me. However, both of the Epic games I have installed, Watch Dogs and The Stanley Parable, are tied (to some degree) to other launchers, Uplay and Steam respectively.
Hopefully, by the time you’re reading this, the issue will have been resolved. Even if it takes a while for Epic to get the situation under control, Trevor, Franklin and Michael’s adventures in Los Santos will be free to keep if you claim them by next Thursday.
