GTA 6 Fans Braced For A Fully Unplayable Launch Day

Ever since Rockstar revealed the pre-order details for Grand Theft Auto 6, both the future and launch state of the highly anticipated game have been somewhat up in the air regarding what players can actually expect from the experience. Considering we don’t even have a gameplay trailer yet, despite pre-orders already up for GTA 6‘s release in a mere 4 months, players have started to raise more than a few concerns about launch day.

While players are understandably frustrated about the uncertainty surrounding the supposed lack of a physical edition of GTA 6 for the sake of game preservation and ownership, it also poses one unique problem that has become even more apparent this past week.

As noted once again by GTAVI_Countdown on X, a recent port of the first two Call of Duty: Black Ops games was able to crash the PlayStation store over the amount of traffic the classic games brought in. If a port of two games from the early 2010s was able to take the store down, there’s a genuine concern about how bad are things going to get when GTA 6 ends up going live.

Needless to say, fans have been taking this as another great example of why digital-only games can’t be trusted for such massive releases like GTA 6. X user Allen, for example, jokes that they’re excited about using a physical installation from a disc to “skip the store being down,” an approach that won’t actually be possible.

In the meantime, other fans have also been taking the surprisingly massive success of the Black Ops port to target PlayStation owners themselves instead of Rockstar, and Mikey Longy points out the irony of “everyone complaining about digital purchases but crashed the PS store buying COD.” While it’s hard to directly compare the two, fans like Tungsten__Cube are adamant that successes like these are “going to be used as evidence in favor of going all digital.”

Jason and Lucia dance together at a club, wearing Vintage Vice City clothes, in GTA 6.

Thankfully, it isn’t all doom and gloom for the release of GTA 6, as Rockstar has offered a fairly generous one-week advanced preload period to give players plenty of time to download and prepare for the full release, even if the store goes down for several days as a result.

Unfortunately, even with the silver lining, some fans have brought up concerns about potential “DDOS attacks” from groups either trying to send a message to Rockstar or causing chaos among its player base. If these happen, they would likely have the highest chance of occurring either at the start of the preload period or the full release itself.

While we’ll still have to wait and see how Rockstar and Sony will manage the digital-only release and its supposed ultimate edition exclusivity, incidents like these aren’t easy to overlook as potential warning signs for what Grand Theft Auto 6 fans can expect to experience in November.