Random Topic Generator: Take Two Vs Mods

Thursday morning, I discovered that Rockstar’s parent company, Take Two, has taken down the biggest mod for GTA 5. OpenIV has received a cease and desist, forcing it to shut down permanently and effectively shutting down the entire modding community for GTA 5, which also makes up a huge percentage of the entire community as a whole. The majority of mods need OpenIV to work. It is the most downloaded mod for GTA 5, and gives the player unlimited creative power when playing the game.

Take Two has had a bumpy ride when it comes to modding their games, especially GTA V. They have actively pursued people to shut down their mod(s). This has created a lot of controversy among players, both who create mods or use the mods.

It’s extremely common for PCs games to be modded. It’s hard to find a PC game that hasn’t been modded. Some publishers relish on gamers modding their game, because if a particularly popular mod attracts a lot of attention, that means new people coming to play the game and subsequently increasing the games popularity. It has reached the stage where battling modders and shutting down what they’ve created is only going to force people to turn their heads.

Modding a game increases the gameplay as a whole. Despite GTA V being a ground-breaking game when it was released, with high-levels of detail, there still is only a limited amount of stuff you can do in the game, and without anything original, after playing the story, can become boring and stale. By implementing mods, you can refresh the gameplay, open up more doors for opportunities, and more importantly keep players playing the game. OpenIV allows a vast amount of modders to have fun. The amount of wonderful things they’ve created is amazing, and it is an absolute shame to see it completely dismantled overnight.

When GTA V was released on PC, Take Two took their time with deciding if they would allow modding, and eventually they said yes, except that must have been a lie, because of the events that followed, including recently. They released a statement saying anybody who used mods when playing online would be banned. That makes sense. If someone is using mods and the other person isn’t, the person using mods is cheating because they have a strong advantage over the other person. Keeping online from being modded is a completely natural thing to battle, but it doesn’t make sense constantly preventing the single player mode from being modded, when no harm is being done to online.

Well, actually, in Take Two’s eyes, modding single player mode does damage their online mode because people are only playing single player, and therefore staying away from online – which is only ever riddled with micro-transactions that Take Two are attempting to ram down our throats.

After this mode, Take Two must see an instant impact on the number of players playing the game. Even people who don’t use mods are rallying against them because after all, it’s all one huge community, working like clockwork. Take Two has essentially dismantled the community they are trying to keep by preventing people from modding the game.

It’s difficult to know what to do in situations such as this, however, you can protest by either not playing the game until they allow mods again, or leave a negative comment on Steam. Maybe once they’ve seen just how big of a mistake they’ve made will they attempt to put things right, even though I do highly doubt that because plenty of people have left the game due to the war between the community and Take Two – only to return once it’s over, which doesn’t appear to be yet. Apparently, the war has only just begun.

Take Two has said that according to them, modding GTA V is illegal because modders were modifying their software. If it was illegal, every company would be battling modders. It’s not illegal, it’s fair use.

I will not be playing GTA V or any of Rockstar’s games until this issue has been sorted. That even includes Kerbal Space Program which they acquired March this year, and I urge many people to do the same. If Take Two sees a rapid drop, they will allow modding once more or face losing essentially everyone. They are building a bad reputation for themselves, and if they’re not careful, they will be as bad as Ubisoft and EA once were.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)