‘GTA V’ Mods Are Leaving And Steam Isn’t Happy

The developers of OpenIV, one of the more popular modding tools for Grand Theft Auto V and the rest of the series, has received a formal take down notice by Take-Two Interaction, Grand Theft Auto’s publisher.

You can read Good-NTS’s post, the lead developer of OpenIV, right here. Here is part of what it said:

For almost ten years of OpenIV development, we had tried to play as nice as possible and even more:

• Strictly following of Civil Code of Russia (only reverse engineering for interoperability).
• Only clean-room reverse engineering.
• No distribution of original data and code.
• And absolutely no messing with Online…

On June 5th, 2017, we had received an official Cease-and-Desist letter.
It clearly says, that with OpenIV we “allow third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify that software in violation Take-Two’s rights“.
Yes, this letter is illiterate both technically and grammatically (really, they don’t even bothered with proof-reading the text).
Yes, we can go to court and yet again prove that modding is fair use and our actions are legal.
Yes, we could. But we decided not to.

Going to court will take at least few months of our time and huge amount of efforts, and, at best, we’ll get absolutely nothing.
Spending time just to restore status quo is really unproductive, and all the money in the world can’t compensate the loss of time.

So, we decided to agree with their claims and we’re stopping distribution of OpenIV.

It was a hard decision, but when any modding activity has been declared illegal, we can’t see any possibilities to continue this process,
unless top management of Take-Two company makes an official statement about modding, which can be used in court.

With many thanks for all modding community for all your fantastic creations,
OpenIV team.

Mods have been long used as way to extend the life of a game, long after it is done receiving updates. While GTA V is still updated quite regularly, the majority of those updates only focus on the GTA Online portion of the game, leaving the single-player mode to modders. We’re unsure on why they waiting so long to send the take down since modding has gone on in the series for nearly a decade now.

Users on Steam are unhappy about the decision, to put in nicely.

The game is / can be fun but, with 2K LITERALLY MAKING MODS ILLEGAL there is no point in buying the game as the singleplayer is devoid of most the cool♥♥♥♥♥♥(And will be even more devoid of content as over half of the single player content is mod based) you cant get a lot of the cool stuff thats in online mode in the singleplayer and online is so overbloated with pay to win microtransactions that if you just joined (unless you buy in game currency with real money) you’re going to be an ant in a giant sandboxes filled with the kind of people that will send 6 airforce jets with lock-on missiles after you for 2 straight hours just for a laugh.

That’s one of the more in-depth reviews, most of them fall under the lines of “screw Take-Two” or something similar. Sadly, this isn’t the only mod fiasco that’s going on. Bethesda recently announced they are taking another go at the whole paid mods situation, this time with Bethesda Creation Club, but this time they insist it isn’t paid mods.