After 13 long years, Rockstar Games Social Club which is the DRM plus central community hub for games like GTA, Red Dead, and many more has been shut down. The Social Club also tracked individual players’ in-game stats, achievements, leaderboards, online multiplayer events and more, basically it was an inseparable part of all Rockstar titles that has now come to it’s end. Currently, the URL for the website just redirects to the home page which pretty much indicates that the longstanding Rockstar Games Social Club has been officially shut down.
Rockstar Games insider, Videotechuk, has reported today that the online platform is no longer available which could be part of Rockstar’s plan to introduce something even better and bigger.
“Currently viewing profiles, walls, photos, videos viewing from users are gone, but could be part of new plans to introduce a new platform,” Videotechuk said.
The decade long online platform didn’t particularly age well with time and had more than it’s fair share of problems including many instances of serious issues reported by users.
“Social Club was incredibly outdated, with more cases of crews being hijacked and accounts being targeted easily,” Videotechuk continued. “They’re most likely finally working on a new platform ready for GTAVI.”
But while Rockstar Games Social Club wasn’t without it’s problems, it actually offered less restrictions on the DRM side of things than several older online platforms such as Ubisoft’s Uplay and EA’s Origin as both of them were far more draconian than Social Club. And while it was no less of a DRM it did at least allow unlimited installations in case of physical copies which was more generous than what both Ubisoft and EA had offered during the same time period. The Social Club also did a far better job of remembering your account credentials even in case of a long hiatus which was inordinately difficult on both EA and Ubisoft’s online platforms.
It would be interesting to see what Rockstar does next in the absence of their longstanding online platform.
