After an incredibly brief existence, Owlcat has completely rolled back a controversial new launcher from Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. Introduced yesterday, the Owlcat Launcher was intended to be a pre-game space for collating news and updates about Owlcat's various games. "Instead of searching across multiple platforms for updates, news, and announcements, now you can find them all gathered in one convenient place whenever you launch the game," said the studio.

As (you would have thought) anyone could see coming, players hated it. Though Owlcat said it had taken pains to make the launcher as "unobtrusive" as possible—it required "no mandatory registration," said it did not collect player data, and could notionally be entirely turned off—players responded negatively. The Rogue Trader subreddit and Steam forum were immediately awash with complaints.

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Partially, of course, that's for the simple reason that these sort of pre-game launchers are universally terrible: bloatware that's useless at best and intrusive at worst. But making matters worse was the fact that turning off the launcher did not, in fact, turn it off. It just made the launcher run invisibly.

"Apparently if the launcher closed, the game stopped recording Steam time (because launcher ID is now how the game is recognized by default)," wrote Owlcat community manager Starrok in the Rogue Trader subreddit. In other words, if Steam didn't detect the launcher running, it wouldn't count your hours in the game. "The team decided to use this background process as a bandaid fix for that.

"I know VERY well how that looks, and unfortunately I was not informed about this change," continued Starrok. "I've already communicated with the team about this and tomorrow they will research how this time display issue can be resolved in a different way rather than leaving an unkilled process that eats up memory."

That was yesterday. Today, it seems that the solution Owlcat settled on was to obliterate the launcher entirely. "We are Rolling Back the Launcher," reads the title of a new announcement. "The game will now revert to the previous patch, completely removing any Launcher-related changes. Thank you for your feedback, and genuinely sorry for the frustration caused." Fans seem pleased.

All in all, the Owlcat Launcher lived for about 19 hours, which is slightly less than the life expectancy of an adult mayfly. It's not the studio's first controversy like this, either: back in 2023, fan pushback forced it to strip a data-sucking tool out of Wrath of the Righteous.

Credit where it's due, plenty of studios would simply leave the offending tech in and ride out the wave of complaints. Opposite-of-credit where it's due, I can't imagine someone at Owlcat didn't know how this stuff would be received ahead of launch. Studio decision-makers should probably listen to them.

Anyway, I've reached out to Owlcat to ask if this is the final end for the launcher, or if it plans to bring it back in some form. I'll update this piece if I hear back.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is still five months away (on consoles, remember, no PC release date yet) and preorders won't be live until later this week. But that apparently hasn't stopped numerous websites from promising eager fans that they can get early access to the game right now for a price. Lest there be any doubt, cybersecurity company Malwarebytes is warning that they're nothing but a scam.

A report posted today says "a new wave of scam websites" are offering "VIP early access" to the next GTA in exchange for a grossly inflated price of "a few hundred dollars," payable in cryptocurrency. Malwarebyte also shared a few images of the scam sites in question.

One site leverages GTA 6, Mr. Beast, and Lego all at the same time—a powerful combo, no doubt.

But of course, there's nothing to be had. Worse, because payments are made in crypto, there's no way to recover or report the loss. The money is gone and there's no getting it back.

Stefan Dasic of Malwarebytes described GTA 6 as "the perfect bait" for scams like this in his report. Grand Theft Auto is among the biggest game franchises in the world, with hundreds of millions of copies sold, and it's been 13 years since GTA 5. The hype for GTA 6 is enormous, and "scammers simply exploit that excitement."

You might think that this sort of thing is way too obvious for anyone to fall for, but as a wise old friend once told me, you don't know what you don't know. I've been online for almost as long as 'online' has existed, and I write about this stuff for a living—but a 14-year-old with a smartphone, no matter how hip to the scene he may appear, might be tempted to take a shot.

But it's not just kids, to be clear. As the report points out (and as we've all no doubt seen once or twice in our lives), burning desire can overwhelm chilled caution, and verbiage used on these scam sites encourage impulsive decisions. They also look pretty legit, and the situation is further confused by the fact that preordering a more expensive edition for "advance access" to a new release is very common for videogames now.

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Dasic said Malwarebytes doesn't have information on how many people are visiting these sites but the bottom line is that, like all scams, they persist because they work.

"I am amazed when I see which scams managed to fool people," Dasic told PC Gamer. "There will always be at least one person that will fall for this—either being too young, or too immature, probably not well informed and just wanting to be the first to have their hands on something before everyone else."

Just about everyone is hot to trot for GTA 6, but keep this in mind and keep a clear head: There is no Grand Theft Auto 6 early access at this point. If Rockstar does announce some kind of premium "advance access" for GTA 6, you should only buy it from official sources. And last but certainly not least, if a site is insisting that you pay with crypto it's time to put your hand on your wallet and head for the door. (That last one is pretty much a universal truth, though, so apply it across the board.)

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19, and preorders—official, real, not-a-scam preorders—will begin on June 25. We're still waiting for the PC version to be announced.