Early this month, the Grand Theft Auto V/Online community suffered the shutdown of OpenIV, a modding tool that’s served the series’ community for almost 10 years, following a cease-and-desist letter Rockstar and Take-Two sent its operators. Rockstar said it wasn’t targeting single-player mods but dealing with OpenIV’s enabling of “malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody.” Three more mods, cheat-centric, were served takedowns last week and tasked with donating their profits to charity, all of which led gamers to petition the companies to stop — some even began a (successful) campaign to tank the game’s Steam ratings. Even the BBC reported on the scuffle.
Over the weekend, Rockstar tried to calm players.
“Take-Two has agreed that it generally will not take legal action against third-party projects involving Rockstar’s PC games that are single-player, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of third parties,” the company writes, though excepting the online game server, hacks and cheats, and IP violations from that rule and reserving the right to change the policy whenever it chooses, none of which is soothing Reddit.
Motherboard implies that Rockstar seems to be attempting to distance itself from Take-Two’s original position and is negotiating with both the parent company and the developer of OpenIV to sort it out.
