It’s unfortunate that Rockstar Games decided to restrict the PC version of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition to its own software, as the launch of the remastered collection has turned out to be a pretty big disaster. Services for the Rockstar Games Launcher have been offline for over 24 hours, preventing anyone from accessing the PC version of the game without offline workarounds. Rockstar Games has also removed GTA: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition from its official store.
Services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles are temporarily offline for maintenance. Services will return as soon as maintenance is completed.
— Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) November 11, 2021
“We thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work on restoring services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles,” Rockstar said in another tweet early this morning. It’s now ten hours later, but Rockstar’s official service status page suggests that the launcher is still down and that other PC titles such as Red Dead Online are unplayable.
Rockstar hasn’t elaborated on why the game was pulled, but one theory suggests that it might have something to do with licensed music. A dataminer discovered that GTA: San Andreas still contains all of the original tracks, even those with expired licenses.
So the audio format of choice for the Definitive Editions is OGG-VORBIS! More interesting however, San Andreas contains all the cut music! It's just disabled by script! pic.twitter.com/FBGJINdBYy
— Ash R. (@Ash_735) November 11, 2021
Dataminers have also discovered files in the code that provide insight on cut and missing content. There are even some interesting comments left by Rockstar developers.
Haha, Prawn Island was internally called "Porn Island"
— Vadim M. (@NationalPepper) November 11, 2021
Well Stacked Pizza was "Pizza Hut" internally. Pure joy. pic.twitter.com/4lP7b6Gqat
I wonder, who are "they". 😃 pic.twitter.com/oeqKjFoDnk
— Vadim M. (@NationalPepper) November 11, 2021
Source: Rockstar Games