Take-Two Interactive is taking a stand against ‘GTA V’ mods
Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar Games' parent company, has recently been waging a war against modders of their games in the Grand Theft Auto franchise by issuing DMCA strikes on the overhauls of their games.
Last week, players and modders have mentioned that most of the mods that were made have been initially removed from ModDB, but have now been reposted.
Among these popular mods are the reverse engineered versions of GTA 3 and Vice City, GTA: Liberty City, Vice Cry, the total texture update for GTA: Vice City, and GTA: Underground, which is the most ambitious as it uses all of previous Rockstar games maps including those from Bully and Manhunt 1 and 2.
The company also faced backlash in 2017 from the modding community as they previously tried to shut down their modding software OpenIV, which was then reopened after the controversy.
A thread on GTAForums is keeping tabs about the recent events that transpired the last few days, including updates about the removals and restorations of the mods.
It also noted that the recent rules about modding Rockstar’s IPs have been changed without their notice.
The specific changes that are affecting these mods include the restriction of the "use or importation of other IP (including other Rockstar IP) in the project" or "making new games, stories, missions, or maps."
People are connecting this behavior of the company to two main things: One being that these are confirming that Rockstar will indeed be releasing remakes of their previous games, and the other is that these are all connected to the still unannounced and unconfirmed Grand Theft Auto 6.
However, these are just theories and speculations, and given that DMCA rules have been much stricter the past year especially when it comes to music, clips, or anything that has royalties to it, these theories and speculations should be treated as such for the time being.
(Images from Rockstar)