One of the most highly-anticipated titles of the year is Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. Rockstar’s remaster of the PS2 trilogy was expected to be one of the best selling games this year, not only because of GTA‘s immense popularity, but because of the wide range of platforms it was going to be released on.
On November 11, launch day arrived and something really odd happened: The PC version of the GTA trilogy went missing. While the game can currently be played on home consoles, PC players can’t find the game anywhere. This includes people who pre-ordered the game, because not only has GTA itself disappeared from places like Steam, but Rockstar’s launcher is also currently not working. Anyone trying to play a Rockstar game on PC right now, such as GTA Online or Red Dead Redemption, can’t get on to play.
Right now, the official word is that the launcher is down for maintenance, but this “maintenance” has been going on since Thursday.
Services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles are temporarily offline for maintenance. Services will return as soon as maintenance is completed.
— Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) November 11, 2021
Maintenance is necessary sometimes for servers and launchers, and the stress of a wave of people going online all at once to play a game can cause some of these to crash, but delisting the game from stores is not part of normal maintenance. For starters, nobody schedules maintenance the same day as the launch of a hugely-anticipated title. Not only that, but Rockstar would never let a cash cow like GTA Online be unplayable this long. All of this is very weird and tells us something has gone wrong, but what that something is can only be guessed because Rockstar has stayed quiet outside of one update indicating they’re aware of how long the maintenance is currently taking.
We thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work on restoring services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles.
— Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) November 12, 2021
While the games are likely doing incredibly well on home consoles, this is an absolute disaster of a PC launch for Rockstar.