Epic Games Store Is Down, But Don't Worry

Today Epic Games had a bit of a mishap, and it's ongoing as this article is set to go live. The situation here has to do with the release of the game Grand Theft Auto 5 (AKA GTA V) being given away for free. Imagine, one of the most interesting open world games ever made, given away for free, at the end of the school year, during a global pandemic – what could go wrong?

The Epic Games Store is "experiencing high traffic" right now, according to the officials that run the store. "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," said Epic Games.

It would appear that the developers behind the Epic Games Store are, as should be obvious, aiming to "provide an update as soon as we can." They're working on the problem as we speak, and the store should be returned to service as soon as the whole entire world stops hammering the store attempting to download the one game all at once.

They're not going to run out of downloads, and you're not likely going to miss the download window if you've been trying to download the game this morning. This isn't the sort of thing that'd make sense for Epic Games to allow to push the game back into a pay-to-download sort of model. GTAV (or GTA V, if you prefer), will be the next major title in Epic Games' (game store) future giant collection of free-to-play games. Because of Fortnite, Epic Games is about to become a very, very different company – just you wait!

If you'd like to see the roadmap for Epic Games' own Epic Games Store near-future, take a peek at the Trello board right this minute. Shown there as "recently shipped" are features such as Critic Reviews, Wishlists, Local Currencies (CAD, AUD, SEK, DKK, and NOK), as well as everyone's favorite: Download Throttling!