The 'GTA Trilogy' remasters completely broke Rockstar's PC launcher

The remastered GTA Trilogy was released yesterday for just about every console as well as for PC. If you head to Rockstar’s landing page for the game today, though, you might notice something missing. The PC version of the remastered games is no longer available.

That’s because the Rockstar Games Launcher — where the game is exclusively available on PC — is dead. Well, okay, it hasn’t been pronounced dead by the proper authorities just yet, but it definitely flatlined yesterday. A slew of technical issues related to the GTA Trilogy launch sent the Games Launcher spiraling into the abyss.

At this point, the launcher has been down for nearly a full day. Rockstar has been vastly uncommunicative about the cause of the outage but it’s affecting all of the developer’s PC games — not just GTA Trilogy. Don’t bother trying to log into Red Dead Redemption 2 for a while.

Could be a while… Rockstar initially tweeted that the launcher would be taken temporarily offline for maintenance a little after 2 p.m. ET yesterday — maintenance that likely wasn’t planned, seeing as it was a big release day for Rockstar. Then, nothing but silence from the company for about 15 hours. Yeah, 15 hours. When the company came back to give an update at 5 a.m. ET, it didn’t exactly provide much info.

“We thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work on restoring services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles,” the company tweeted. Rockstar’s service status page provides no additional information.

As far as the public knows, the launcher could come back online in just a few hours. Or it could be down for much longer; Roblox’s recent outage left players offline for more than three days.

Plenty of other complaints, too — Those who have been able to download the GTA Trilogy haven’t been much happier than those stuck in launcher limbo. The remastered classics have been plagued by a number of oddities, ranging from just-plain-quirky to virtually unplayable.

Many of the remastered character models are downright uncanny, for one thing. The Switch versions of the remasters apparently suffer from enormous frame rate fluctuations and generally operate at much lower resolutions than on other consoles. Features meant to be cool upgrades, like weather patterns, sometimes end up making the games impossible to navigate, IGN reports. Lots of songs have reportedly been removed from the games, too, due to expired licenses.

Those interested in playing the remasters on a PC will need to just wait until Rockstar’s figured out a fix. All versions of the GTA games have been removed from other digital storefronts like Steam. Everyone else might want to wait, too, in the hopes that Rockstar will implement fixes for other console versions as well.