GTA V is right now free to download and play for all PC gamers right now on the Epic Games Store. The offer comes amidst all of us being stuck in nation-wide lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and is one of the hand-counted glimmers of hope for all of us quarantining at home. However, if you too sound enamoured by the idea of getting one of the best games of all time to play for free on your PC, there’s a catch — thanks to GTA V’s incredibly enduring popularity, the Epic Games Store appears to have crashed, sending Twitter into a meme frenzy.
With the announcement of GTA V being offered for free, thousands of hopeful gamers appear to have headed to the Epic Games Store, only to find their servers returning error codes. Epic Games has since issued a statement on Twitter. As of five hours before publishing of the story, Epic wrote, “We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store. 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.”
The error, however, seems to have been long drawn, and a second tweet by Epic Games Store from three hours ago affirmed that they still haven’t managed to get their servers back online. It could independently verify that as of 2AM IST, the Epic Games Store was still down. While the offering of GTA V for free appears to have brought a surge of traffic and interest towards the Epic store, the server crash has in turn affected the entire store adversely, sending all Epic Games Store titles out of reach for potential customers.
GTA V, launched in 2013, is part of an enduring gaming portfolio that is lauded for its open world gameplay, intrinsic layering of characters, and the myriad ways in which players can reach their objectives. With GTA V being offered for free right now, gamers stuck in lockdown would have an excellent game to play for free at hand. All eyes, now, will be on the Epic Games Store, and it now remains to be seen how soon can they get their games library back online. Offering big titles for free for a limited period usually has a trickle-down effect on other titles as well, and Epic would certainly not want to miss out on that.