Rockstar owner Take-Two has reportedly sent private investigators to convince fans not to make multiplayer mods for GTA Online.
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Now, mod creator Ntuathy has released a statement on Reddit alleging that Take-Two went as far as to send a pair of private investigators to his home to strong arm him into cancelling all work on FiveM.
A publisher sending PIs to a modder’s home is extremely troubling, if true, and once again it simply looks like Rockstar and Take-Two would rather nobody modded GTA 5 at all.
According to a report from GameRant, the creator of well-known “Grand Theft Auto” mod dubbed “FiveM” was visited by private investigators recently. “Take2 Interactive Inc. have contacted us and they asked us to stop GTA:Multiplayer, because from Take2’s point of view GTA:MP is a rival of their business”, the mod’s development team said. A lot of people stated that Rockstar and Take2 could have worked with us together and improved the GTA:Online experience, but obviously they have enough employees to care about GTA:5 and GTA:O, we are just developers who love to mod. If you have a successful game and you have a lot of plans for the future, do you want that a 3rd party modification destroys your plans and maybe ruins your work which is already work in progress? Given that FiveM circumvents GTA V’s network code to place players on a separate set of multiplayer servers, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t breaking that prohibition, or that it doesn’t facilitate piracy.
Although mods for GTA V’s single-player mode are rife, and largely left to do their own thing by Rockstar, it seems Take-Two are serious about stopping anyone messing about with GTA Online or creating alternate multiplayer modes. “Oh, they also “couldn’t disclose any conversations they’re having with other modification developers”, didn’t want to talk about general modification policy as “it was just about my case” and admitted they “looked through my source code”, he adds. “But you have to see that Take-Two Interactive Inc.is the publisher and Rockstar Games only the developer”, he said. According to the update, the developers, respect other developer’s intellectual property and their legitimate interests and that is why Rockstar’s developers have invested so much time to create this attractive game and that is why they have been stopped from further development. In august players caught using FiveM were banned.
Where Rockstar and publisher Take-Two draw the line are mods that impede their ability to make money from their game. Aside from violating the Rockstar licence agreement, the modders could also face legal challenges under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention language.
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A message from the developers explained: “Snapmatic photographers all over southern S.A. competed to see who could most artfully capture the freshly tailored rides from GTA Online: Lowriders and who could come up with the most photogenically frightening scenarios featuring the new content from the Halloween Surprise”. It’s also hard to say how the reverse engineering exemption might play in here.
