It's no secret that the past two weeks for the launch of Rockstar's online multiplayer portion of their sandbox title Grand Theft Auto 5 has been somewhat plagued by a variety of issues. Ranging from characters being deleted which results in players losing tons of time and money to my own character appearing in-game with invisible legs and arms looking somewhat out of place, the launch hasn't been the greatest.

Rockstar has been hard at it though, with the third patch having gone live within the past few days that helped ellevate the deletion issue and also fix up some of the server networking for smoother performance. To help celebrate the now functional multiplayer, Rockstar are giving out free in-game cash for all.

iven some of the recent technical issues during these first days of GTA Online, and now that things are starting to look much smoother (touch wood!), we are planning to provide a special stimulus package for all who have played or will play Grand Theft Auto Online this month. We will be dropping a cool half a million GTA$ in the GTA Online bank accounts of all players this month, starting as early as next week.

In order to keep the current worldwide in-game economy balanced, we will be providing this GTA$ to players via two deposits of $250,000. We will announce specific dates as soon as possible, but are currently hoping to be able to make the first deposit by the end of next week (after we’ve confirmed that issues causing game progress loss have been fixed) with the second installment to happen by the end of the month. For players who experienced cloud server errors, connection issues, and lost game progress and characters in these first days of GTA Online, we hope this GTA$ helps to facilitate a fresh start or makes your continued life in Los Santos and Blaine County extra sweet.

Free cash is always a nice addition, and I won't personally say no to any rewards for sticking it through the rocky launch. Rockstar's Newswire post has the full details on how exactly this will all work, but look forward to the cash stimulus come sometime next week with the launch of update v1.04.