Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V has been in development since 2009, delayed the game numerous times for further polishing, but they failed to fix the most frequent issue faced by many GTA V owners.

I personally ran into the same error after successfully installing the game, when the game was about to download the 5GB patch, the launcher displayed “The Rockstar Game Services Are Unavailable” (Code 1)/(Code 2) error and after going through most of the posts about game services unavailable error on support.rockstargames.com, reddit.com, steamcommunity.com and others, I followed and tried the instructions suggested by Rockstar:

According to Rockstar, the issue will be resolved by following the steps below (which did not work for me):

“If you created a new Windows account to play before the fix, you will be able to continue playing GTAV on your original Windows account by following the steps below:

• Log in to the new account you created, and copy your game data to a folder that can be accessed from both user accounts:
  • Go to the “My Documents\Rockstar Games” and copy the “GTA V” folder.
  • Go to your root directory (e.g. C:\) and paste the folder there.
• Log out of the temporary account, and log back in to your original Windows account.
• Copy your game data into your original account:
  • Go to your root directory (e.g. C:\) and copy the “GTA V” folder you pasted earlier.
  • Go to the “My Documents” folder
    • If you already have a “Rockstar Games” folder:
      • Click into the “Rockstar Games” folder and paste the “GTA V” folder there.
    • If you do not have a “Rockstar Games” folder:
      • Create a new folder in this directory called “Rockstar Games” (without the quotes).
      • Paste the “GTA V” folder in this new directory.
• If you are on a native Korean, Chinese, or Japanese version of Windows:
  • Please download this file.
  • Run “GTA_V_Bootstrap_1_0_0_1.exe”
  • Launch the game, and you should not have any further issues.
• If you are on any other version of Windows:
  • You should not have to complete any further steps; simply launch the game. In the event that you are still experiencing problems, please follow the instructions for native Korean, Chinese, and Japanese versions of Windows above.
• Note: If you scanned for music for “Self Radio” and turned off auto-scan in the audio options, you’ll need to re-scan for music or turn auto-scan back on:
  • Open the pause menu from either Story Mode or GTA Online.
  • Scroll right to the SETTINGS tab.
  • Scroll down and select the Audio menu.
  • Scroll down to Auto-Scan for Music, and scroll to On.”

Since the above suggestions didn’t work for me, I changed DNS server settings on Windows 8 and updated then with Google DNS by following the instructions below (via):

• Go to the Control Panel.
  Click Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center > Change adapter settings.
  Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example:
  To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, right-click Local Area Connection > Properties.
  To change the settings for a wireless connection, right-click Wireless Network Connection > Properties.
  If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
  Select the Networking tab. Under This connection uses the following items, select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) or Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) and then click Properties.
  Click Advanced and select the DNS tab. If there are any DNS server IP addresses listed there, write them down for future reference, and remove them from this window.
  Click OK.
  Select Use the following DNS server addresses. If there are any IP addresses listed in the Preferred DNS server or Alternate DNS server, write them down for future reference.
  Replace those addresses with the IP addresses of the Google DNS servers:
  For IPv4: 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4.
  For IPv6: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and/or 2001:4860:4860::8844
  Restart the connection.

Updated July 2016 The above instructions didn’t help me either. I then decided to install Windscribe, the application automatically changed my IP and location, so I launched GTA V to check if changing my IP helped, Voila! it connected to Rockstar game services and started to download the patch, the download completed and I was finally able to play the game.

Check out the first gameplay walkthrough after the break:

Don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comment section below.