If you somehow don’t already own Grand Theft Auto V you’ll soon be able to get it for free on PC through the Epic Games Store.
According to a now deleted tweet, GTA V will be the digital storefront’s latest free game, available to download and keep starting sometime soon until May 21. The Epic Games Store had previously teased the game last week, tweeting out a picture of a giant bank vault.
Tweet ad is deleted, so here you go pic.twitter.com/3oja0C3418
— Wario64 (@Wario64) May 14, 2020
Originally released in 2013 on PS3 and Xbox 360, GTA V has remained one of the current console generation’s perennially best-selling games, thanks in large part to its thriving GTA Online community where players can go on heists together, hoard cash, and indulge in all sorts of weirder shenanigans.
https://kotaku.com/gta-online-heists-ranked-1843398762
Normally $30, the game was previously free-to-play for a limited time for Game Pass subscribers on Xbox One earlier this year. Now it’ll be free for anyone with a PC that can run it, likely a small price for Rockstar to pay in exchange for an influx of new players into its microtransaction economy.
Update: 11:58 a.m. ET: “We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store,” Epic announced on Twitter this morning. Epic says users are currently encountering slow load times, 500 errors, and crashes.
Sure enough, when I tried to load the Epic Games Store launcher on my desktop this morning here’s what I got:
It’s not clear if this is the result of people rushing to get GTA V when it becomes free on the store today, or some other issue. Fortnite is also apparently experiencing outages at the moment on PC and Mac.
Update: 8:02 a.m. ET, 5/15/20: The store and launcher are working again. According to an update from Epic last night, fixes have been deployed to resolve the outages for most people.
We've deployed updates to provide resolution for these issues, and most users should be able to access the Epic Games Store and Launcher at this time. We'll continue to monitor traffic and provide updates if further issues are encountered. Thank you for your continued patience!
— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) May 15, 2020
Update, 11:16 a.m. ET, 5/15/20: Epic now reports that some players are having a tough time downloading free games. It says anyone getting an error message should wait 24 hours and try again:
We're aware that some users are encountering the following error message on the Epic Games Store: "Your account is unable to download any more free games at this time."
If you receive this error, please wait 24 hours. You should then be able to proceed with downloading the game.
— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) May 15, 2020
