Last week, the Grand Theft Auto V/Online community was rocked by 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 what it says was OpenIV’s enabling of “malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody,” in spite of player arguments that single-player mods are theoretically not available to play in GTAO.
Turns out Rockstar and Take Two weren’t done. As the purveyors of the Force Hax mod menu announced, they’ve been driven offline too and were actually tasked with donating their profits to charity, since confirmed by Rockstar.
“After discussions with Take-Two Interactive, effective immediately we are ceasing all maintenance, development and distribution of the Force Hax cheat menu services. We will be donating our proceeds to charity and we apologize for any and all problems Force Hax services have caused to the Grand Theft Auto Online community.”
Kotaku reports that two other such potential cheat mods have vanished over the weekend following presumed C&D letters: Lexicon and Menyoo.
GTAV’s Steam reviews have taken a massive nosedive thanks to a concerted campaign by angry gamers to tank its ratings — in fact, it’s now worse than it was last week, down in the “overwhelmingly negative” zone, in spite of the fact that legit players are happy that actual cheats are being taken out.
Users are down-voting GTA V like crazy. Never mess with the mods :) pic.twitter.com/EOIVIOVimb
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) June 17, 2017
