After Rocket League went free-to-play, its servers crashed

Earlier today Rocket League became available on the Epic Games Store for free after being removed from sale on Steam (though existing players keep their copies, of course). The influx of new players, combined with a bunch of returning players thanks to the simultaneous start of Rocket League's latest competitive season, hit servers hard. As the official Rocket League Twitter account announced, "Tournaments, Challenges, and other Rocket League features are impacted by this degradation. Updates to follow when online services are restored."

Over the course of the day matchmaking and challenges were restored, followed by competitive tournaments. In an update to the free-to-play release tracker on Reddit, it's been noted that, "Competitive Tournaments are up, but capacity may still be limited as we monitor for stability."

Release day for multiplayer games is always a fraught thing, and I guess that's just as true of re-releases. It certainly won't go down in the list of the worst launches in PC gaming.

If you're new to Rocket League, welcome to the club and remember not to break Rule One.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.