[Update: Nearly 29 hours after the outage was first announced, Rockstar tweeted Friday evening that the Rockstar Launcher was back online and most of the company’s PC games were once again fully available. GTA: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition was excepted, though, and remains “unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions. We’re sorry for the disruption and hope to have correct ones up soon,” Rockstar writes]

Original Story

The servers for the Rockstar Games Launcher on PC have been down for nearly 24 hours now, and PC versions of Rockstar’s games have been removed from sale on the company’s website. The timing of the outage is particularly tough for the company, coming amid Thursday’s launch of the remastered Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy.

Rockstar officially noted the outage in a support tweet Thursday afternoon, merely saying that “services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles are temporarily offline for maintenance. Services will return as soon as maintenance is completed.” Fourteen hours later, the company gave a brief update, saying, “We thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work on restoring services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles.” That same update also appears on Rockstar’s support site.

PC Gamer reports that the launcher is loading in offline mode for players who have previously launched specific games on the service. Multiplayer titles like Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Redemption Online remain inaccessible on PC for the time being, however. And for those launching recently downloaded titles like the GTA Definitive Trilogy for the first time, a required online authentication check will fail during the outage.

As Ars’ own Sam Machkovech put it in his overall negative impressions of the remastered games:

While the games’ authentication process may return before long, the fact that the games need to check in online is maddening. These games include zero online functionality—not even friend leaderboards, let alone the two-player mode from San Andreas. This hobbling of the PC version is inexcusable.

The outage comes one month after Rockstar removed downloadable versions of the original Grand Theft Auto trilogy games from console and PC storefronts ahead of the remaster’s release. Anyone who previously purchased those editions can still download and play them on their original platforms. Those versions also make use of the Rockstar Launcher on PC, though, meaning fresh downloads are still locked for the time being.

Rockstar has given no indication of when it expects its PC services to be restored. We’ll let you know if and when we hear more.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1812593