The Epic Games Store Goes Down As Everyone Tries To Get GTA V For Free (extremetech.com) 41
The Epic Games Store has been down for several hours as people flood the service to snap up GTA V for free. "We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store," Epic acknowledges in a tweet. "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." ExtremeTech reports: The surge in traffic for the Epic Game Store has apparently been intense enough that it has actually created issues for related Epic services like Epic Battle Breakers and Fortnite.
If you can't get on the EGS to pick up your copy of the game, don't worry -- it's going to be free through May 21. It isn't clear which edition of the game Epic is giving away, however, because nobody can log in to check. Rumors ran wild on this point, with some implying Epic would give away the "latest premium edition with additional content." At the very least, the rumor is that this represents the complete title, not just a front-end for accessing either the single-player campaign or GTA Online. Epic is having something of a banner week. "First, Tim Sweeney's company wowed the internet with the new PS5 demo built on Unreal Engine 5," reports ExtremeTech. "Now the EGS has broken down under the weight of Grand Theft Auto, which puts Epic news front-and-center before PC gamers who might not have cared about the console announcement."
Also worth mentioning is the company on Wednesday launched Epic Online Services, giving developers free access to the same kinds of tools used to support Epic Games' massive Fortnite player base.
If you can't get on the EGS to pick up your copy of the game, don't worry -- it's going to be free through May 21. It isn't clear which edition of the game Epic is giving away, however, because nobody can log in to check. Rumors ran wild on this point, with some implying Epic would give away the "latest premium edition with additional content." At the very least, the rumor is that this represents the complete title, not just a front-end for accessing either the single-player campaign or GTA Online. Epic is having something of a banner week. "First, Tim Sweeney's company wowed the internet with the new PS5 demo built on Unreal Engine 5," reports ExtremeTech. "Now the EGS has broken down under the weight of Grand Theft Auto, which puts Epic news front-and-center before PC gamers who might not have cared about the console announcement."
Also worth mentioning is the company on Wednesday launched Epic Online Services, giving developers free access to the same kinds of tools used to support Epic Games' massive Fortnite player base.
Seems like the engine announcement matters for all (Score:2)
Although the demo vide was a running on the PS5, most of what was compelling about the new Unreal engine would apply to any platform the engine ran on - including PC and iOS.
So while the new GTA release is good news for PC gamers too, I would have thought they'd be really happy with the new engine that should give them the same or better quality of results that the PS5 is displaying in that video, using the new Unreal engine in a game built for the PC.
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The engine looked good but not revolutionary. The biggest improvements seem to be on the development side - you can import cinema grade asserts directly without having to do polygon reduction or LOD maps, and then the lighting is done in real-time too.
Actually the water looked really bad in the demo but otherwise it was good. The character was a bit disappointing too, but then again even movie CGI characters are not quite there yet either.
I'm always surprised we didn't get more mileage (Score:2)
I guess a ton of the ram (2-3gb) was reserved for the OS for a while and then you've got the horrors of multi-core programming (a necessity given the under powered CPUs on the PS4/XBone).
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I agree with your criticisms. Actually, I was surprised by the water...but I do PC, not consoles. It'll take a while for devs and progs to design well for new games, and to back port them to older games. Maybe 1 year, probably 2 or so?
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If ones perspective is as a gamer, what happens to the developers workflow isn't really revolutionary in the context of ones own experience. Visually, there's nothing there that can't be done with current graphics engines/cards (and some things that can be done better). Of course, not at that framerate on that hardware, which is the point of making a song and dance about the new engine. But certainly, for a PC gamer, it wouldn't appear revolutionary, even if behind the scenes or for the developer, it is.
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I meant the graphical quality of the output isn't revolutionary. It's good but not the huge leap we have seen with previous generations.
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The engine looked good but not revolutionary. The biggest improvements seem to be on the development side
As pointed out to you in the previous story, you missed the point that the engine was doing its thing at runtime not during development time. That is revolutionary in the amount of detail it is able to bring to the display.
Actually the water looked really bad in the demo but otherwise it was good.
This I agree with. I think though the water looked bad due to poor material specification while the demo was more geared to show the interaction with the player. I think that's a demonstration issue rather than an engine issue.
Kind of Surprised (Score:3)
It's a 7-year old game at this point. I'm honestly surprised that it drove so much traffic as to impact Epic's services.
It really is too bad that Tim Sweeny's a gigantic asshole. If you removed him from Epic and the company actually put some work into the Epic Game Store, sounds like it'd be a good company.
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The real question is how much of a jump in traffic did it create. Something like this (free copy of a really popular game!) is probably going to generate a massive spike in traffic and you don't see too many companies building out their infrastructure to handle several times (maybe well over an order of magnitude) more than their usual traffic. Then people keep refreshing and hanging around because they still want their free game and you've basically created an organic and self-i
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GTA5 is a bit of a weird game in that it has a long standing online audience, where it's basically a "grind forever freemium style game with a buy-in price tag". Hence the large audience. Add to this a problem that grinding in the game is utterly horrible and will easily take years to get everything of daily hardcore grind, and you have a problem as a gamer.
Which many people solved by modding the game and/or cheating to dupe money. Which resulted in Rockstar segregating people who did that into their own lo
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GTA5 is a bit of a weird game in that it has a long standing online audience, where it's basically a "grind forever freemium style game with a buy-in price tag". Hence the large audience.
The community is trash, full of hackers and grievers but it's been a very fun "random goofing around with friends" game, plus we've done all the heists on max difficulty. What killed it for is it the game/server instability combined with atrocious load times and queue systems - not to mention being kicked back offline to "My son James..." which we've heard 10000x times by now. It's just the frustration of suddenly being down a man and then three of us sitting around waiting and waiting for the last guy to j
Re: Kind of Surprised (Score:3)
The community is trash, full of hackers and grievers
First of all the word is "griefers" as these are not people who are in mourning.
Second, the game is all about causing criminal mayhem, so I'm not sure why you're expecting rainbows and flowers. Complaining about cheating and mean behavior in such a context is pretty silly, and on the same level of misplaced butthurt as is triggered by people saying mean things in first person shooters where everyone is literally blowing each other to pieces.
Re: Kind of Surprised (Score:4)
What they are really complaining about, is they are gamers, they like to play the game to get the stuff, they do not want to buy the stuff to win easy against those who do not, that is lame and takes no skill but there are those who want to buy the stuff to win easy, no skill required,basically junior psychopaths with daddy psychopaths credit card, their psycho ego demands they buy the stuff to win, they must fucking win, WIN, WIN, WIN (that includes cheating, for them cheating is good they love pay to win as long as they have daddy psychopaths money to pay to win.)
Now a gaming studio that designs games on that basis is basically run by psychopaths, exploiting the ego of their own kind but if they do not create a worthwhile single play experience for the non-psychopaths players, the computer gamers, they will not buy the game or promote it as a result of playing the single player and then finding the multi-player is utter shite pay to win and avoid it but the psychos will spend up big to win and their ego will force them to do it on every update, fucking suckers but hey they are psychos, the bullies from school days, the two faced lying arseholes they made school life suck for many and they deserve to be exploited at every chance because they will be trying to do it to the rest of us all of the time, the house breakers, the muggers, the rapists et al are all born pay to win types, either buying legal pay to win cheats or illegal pay to win cheats, for them cheating is winning, it is their nature and the nature of the people running those gaming studios, they know their own kind.
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>Behold the power of free!
I am tossing around the tradeoff of getting it for free vs having to install EGS's launcher. Think I'll give it a pass.
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Yah, my first thought after hearing "need an Epic account".
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firts nou need an epic account
then you need 90GB of free space
then you need to join the rockstar social club...
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This is an obvious use case for bittorrent. Huge spike in demand plays perfectly into bit torrent's strengths.
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It's a 7-year old game at this point. I'm honestly surprised that it drove so much traffic as to impact Epic's services.
I'm not. Now a lot of people have a throwaway account which they can use to play with cheats and exploits.
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Tim Sweeny's a gigantic asshole.
Uh huh... I've seen a lot of Steam sycophants insulting Time Sweeny and Epic ever since they launched a competing product, so forgive me if I take this claim with a grain of salt. I did a search for "Tim Sweeny asshole" (I was careful not to do a search for "Tim Sweeny's asshole"), and got a reddit thread bashing him, and Epic, and claiming that he "admits" that a 12% cut isn't enough to run Epic's storefront. As evidence, it offered a link to this [twitter.com] twitter thread, in which Sweeny is very patiently dealing w
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I'm not going to try t
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All that has to do with Sweeney. You know that he's the CEO of Epic, right?
Steam sycophant? How so? Because I like the features that Steam has? GOG is another good platform. It might not be as feature-rich like Steam, but their stuff is DRM-free, so at least they have that feature to compete with (and GOG Galaxy is a nice launcher).
Probably 70-80% of PC releases are Steam exclusives these days
Citation needed. Can you please show me where Steam is mandating exclusivity?
I'm no conspiracy theorist (Score:2)
"Now the EGS has broken down under the weight of Grand Theft Auto, which puts Epic news front-and-center before PC gamers who might not have cared about the console announcement."
"Why wouldn't you upgrade your advertising to include a couple of promotional "news" releases that frame you in nice light."
Really? (Score:2)
('Something went wrong.') Imagine That!
Who would 've thought... (Score:3)
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I don't agree that seven years ago counts as "relatively recent" in a context of video games.
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I don't agree that seven years ago counts as "relatively recent" in a context of video games.
The time between Doom 3 ressurection of evil (doom 3's last expansion) and Rage was 6 years. That was 2005, to 2011, the time between rage and Doom 2016 was 5 years. So given the time between games dropping that's not necessarily wrong given modern AAA games take huge manpower and lots of time to make.
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Who would 've thought that giving away a relatively recent AAA game
Are you in a coma? The game is 7 years old.
Not only free, but you get $10 store credit (Score:1)
Already own the stupid game (Score:1)
It's been beaten and hacked to death. Only reason people are trying to download it is because they're hackers and wanna start getting cracking on Epic's shit DRM which you know will be included somewhere in the mess.
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And here we are a year later (Score:2)
Tim Sweeny still unable to get interest for his crappy store to the point where he needs to give away AAA titles for free.
Well he did say it again, the Epic Games Store is "Just another icon" (his words). I'm not sure why he thinks that is positive in the context of competing with a large feature rich platform like Steam.
But fuck it. Even free + $10 store credit isn't enough to entire some of us who are boycotting EGS for bringing the worst of the console industry (3rd party exclusives) to the PC.
Zero effort to stop cheats .... (Score:2)
I paid for GTAV a couple years ago and still play it occasionally. I don't even know why, really, except it's sort of fun to get in fights with other players and drive around hunting them down -- blowing up each other and their cars.
The missions in the multiplayer game are ok occasionally, but once you figure out the "map" and goals for one and play through it successfully once with a few people, there's not much joy in replaying it. I think a lot of people just grind through replaying the ones they're go