Rocket League's servers died after it went free-to-play yesterday
Things are back up now, but they were down for a good few hours
Rocket League went free-to-play yesterday, which, naturally, caused loads of new players to hop into those funky little football cars for a few matches. The game's new competitive season began, too, bringing in a load of returning players as well. Unfortunately, Rocket League's servers did not like this. Not long after the game updated, the servers went down and players struggled to connect to its online features.
With yesterday's update, Rocket League went free-to-play on the Epic Games Store, with the slight catch that you can no longer get it on Steam. You can still play it there if you own it, though, and and progress is now shared between Steam, Epic and consoles by linking accounts.
As well as this, the patch brought updated tournament and challenge systems, and of course, an influx of players to crash the servers.
"Tournaments, Challenges, and other Rocket League features are impacted by this degradation. Updates to follow when online services are restored," Rocket League posted just after 6pm BST last night.
Over the next few hours, the game's matchmaking and challenges were fixed, though competitive tournaments took a little longer to stabilise. At 11pm BST, they tweeted to let fans know the tournaments were back online, but might fill up while they "expand size and availability over time."
The last update they gave was to tell players about notification issues with one of the NA tournaments. Seeing as they haven't mentioned the servers in a while, hopefully that means everything is back on track now. Unless it's so bad they've roped the poor social media guy into helping fix it all.
Game servers have a habit of crashing when fun new things launch. It happened with PUBG's big deathmatch game mode, Destiny 2's Shadowkeep expansion, GTA Online when it was free on Epic, and so many more. So, it's not a huge surprise that Psyonix's popular motorized footy game suffered the same fate.
Here's hoping now the initial excitement is over, they'll be a bit more stable in the future.