Take-Two Interactive’s Decision to Shut Down OpenIV

Screenshot of Los Santos using the VisualV Graphics Mod. Rockstar Games has created a beautiful world… if only they would let us play in it.

Good evening, Medium. I’ve decided, rather than bottling up my frustrations with the actions of the corporate shills at T2 Interactive, I’d write out my feelings and opinion over this issue. Please excuse me if I swear or use any colourful language in this piece; I am severely frustrated and upset with this situation.

According to the post by OpenIV project’s lead developer, GooD-NTS on GTAForums, and a notice upon initialization of the OpenIV client, Take-Two Interactive Software Incorporated (trading with the symbol TTWO on the NASDAQ) has issued a cease and desist notice to the OpenIV Team stating that distribution and continued development of OpenIV is now banned under threat of continued legal trouble. This was, to me, no doubt an act of supreme corporate greed, the likes of which the gaming community has never seen before.

Sure, you may be able to give me an example of greed in publishers before, but I assure you that none are as serious as this case. This situation far transcends Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games, and the entire gaming industry itself. This situation is a representation of sickening greed in the corporate atmosphere; prohibiting things to the customer. This is far more serious than it may seem at surface level. T2 is literally banning people from making tools that allow the user to see inside of their purchase (because Rockstar wont make a file viewing client like OpenIV themselves because of lack of revenue from their shitty online DLCs due to awesome, free, community made mods that can accomplish the things we want to see in our purchase without having a corporation decide to spoon-feed us what they want to see in our game.) To compare, imagine if a brand like Adidas sold you a pair of shoes and let you put them on but not tie them. That’s exactly like what is happening today.

I’m all for developers making their games how they feel fit and how they’d like to, but there should be some point where they realize that their customers should come first, because there would be no business without them. We, as a player base, are being unfairly treated and forbidden from doing things we want that do not violate literally any rules, in fact Rockstar, earlier this year, said on the topic that “ you should not worry about being banned or being relegated to the cheater pool just for using single player PC mods,” (see here for the original post; the topic is 5th on the page), yet Take-Two has just completely flip-flopped on Rockstar’s own wording!

In technicality, Rockstar’s EULA states that reverse engineering or modification of the game is not allowed, this is an outdated section that isn’t even comparable to the state that GTA 5 is in currently. With two games operating on the GTA 5 platform, GTA 5 Single Player and GTA 5 Online, I believe 2 EULAs should be written, allowing players to modify the game how they see fit in single player only.

So please, Take-Two and Rockstar, please — for the love of all things GTA — let us mod in single player. We aren’t hurting your profits (which I know are the only thing that matters to both of you) since you haven’t released any single SP DLCs or microtransactions (thank god) yet, so I don’t see what we are hurting. If you are afraid people are trying to reverse engineer or redistribute your software, you’re wrong. OpenIV doesn’t even work like that.

The summary of this is the following: Take-Two, please make a statement and try to reason for your blatant disregard for a massive demographic of your player-base.

Update 1 (18:19:00 EDT, June 15th, 2017): I’ve posted a picture on my Twitter explaining how to get away with not updating your GTA V. See below.

[embed]

Update 2 (1:23:00 EDT, June 16th, 2017): Rockstar has issued a statement to PCGamer (see it here) stating that T2’s actions were not specifically targeting single player mods. They also said that OpenIV enables malicious mods, but as has been thoroughly explained before; the OpenIV team specifically designed OIV to not execute in Online sessions. I don’t think Rockstar understands that OpenIV is essentially a RAGE editor (evidenced by the .black integration. Read more about that here). That’s like banning Notepad++ because it can open proprietary filetypes from Microsoft — it is not feasible.

If a file is on a person’s computer, they should be able to launch it from the get-go. If Rockstar is uncomfortable with having third party studios make tools to expose the files to the people who rightfully purchased the item, maybe they should work with the developers from OIV and create a proprietary filesystem viewer which allows people to install singleplayer mods and custom textures, sounds, and any other game aspects which would disable online connection possibilities immediately upon editing your filesystem.

It seems that I am coming across like I despise Rockstar as a studio, but that’s not true. Among other Rockstar titles, I’ve purchased copies of GTA V for literally every single platform it is available on. I love Rockstar — what I don’t like is their choice in publisher. However, with this statement, it sounds to me like Rockstar is trying to reason with Take-Two. Now, don’t quote me on this, but when they say that they are “working to figure out how we can continue to support the creative community without negatively impacting our players,” this sounds like a professional plea to the modding community to stick around while they attend meeting upon meeting, boardroom upon boardroom, and every conversation with every halfwit business shyster who’ve never picked up a Rockstar game, let alone a modded version of Grand Theft Auto V, to try and get them to understand the severity of their actions.

Remember the whole “banned from online because of single player mods” business? Yeah, well I think this is just an evolution of that. The question is though, if Rockstar and Take-Two authorize OIV to continue work, will they? I mean, they have been treated by absolute garbage, even being served by a non-proofread document. On the other hand, however, they have received an ABSURD amount of positive feedback and support from the community, and that might convince GooD-NTS to resume development on the OpenIV project and the Liberty City map mod (which is slated to import the authorization files from a version of GTA IV that is already on your computer, so as to avoid any intellectual property issues.)

I guess we’ll see how it plays out.