Rockstar Games offered an official response to PC Gamer regarding the cease and desist letter that Take-Two Interactive lawyers sent to the OpenIV mod tools development team. According to Rockstar, OpenIV had to be shutdown because it was used to harass other GTA Online players.
The statement reads…
“Take-Two’s actions were not specifically targeting single player mods. Unfortunately OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody. We are working to figure out how we can continue to support the creative community without negatively impacting our players.”
The reality is that shutting down OpenIV doesn’t actually stop hackers or cheaters who use scripts to mod the game, nor does it stop the hackers and cheaters on the PS3 and Xbox 360 from “harassing” or using “malicious” mods to affect other players online.
OpenIV is a toolset used to inject new mods into GTA V. It’s the only tool available that properly decrypts the encryption method Rockstar used to prevent modding in the first place in GTA V.
The team also specifically designed the tools to prevent them from being used in the online portion of GTA Online. Of course, hackers and modders and cheaters have still found other ways to disrupt GTA Online, even without OpenIV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71SYqnNdR3M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6isYvAOxQU
This is also directly antipodes to Rockstar’s stance from back in May of 2015, where they mentioned only cheats and hacks would get you banned but not single-player or cosmetic mods…
“Cosmetic mods are not a bannable offense. However if you require technical support after installing a mod you will need to uninstall the mod before we can help you with any issue you have, as we do not officially support Mods.”
A few days later Rockstar made a post on their official website explaining that they supported the modding community for GTA V and that, once again, single-player mods would not net you a ban.
Their official response read…
“We have always appreciated the creative efforts of the PC modding community and we still fondly remember the awesome zombie invasion mod and original GTA map mod for GTAIV PC among many other classics. To be clear, the modding policy in our license has not changed and is the same as for GTAIV. Recent updates to GTAV PC had an unintended effect of making unplayable certain single player modifications. This was not intentional, no one has been banned for using single player modifications, and you should not worry about being banned or being relegated to the cheater pool just for using single player PC mods. Our primary focus is on protecting GTA Online against modifications that could give players an unfair advantage, disrupt gameplay, or cause griefing. It also bears mentioning that because game mods are by definition unauthorized, they may be broken by technical updates, cause instability, or affect your game in other unforeseen ways.”
The fact that they’re now targeting the tools instead of the abusers means that eventually the modding community for GTA V will die off if OpenIV can’t be updated to keep pace with any core changes that Rockstar makes to the game.
Take-Two Interactive deliberately shutting down the OpenIV tools will have a drastic ripple effect on the modding community, eventually bringing it to a close. Hackers and cheaters will still persist since they rely on scripts, trainers and other injectors to modify the game completely unrelated to OpenIV.
This move follows up on previous efforts from Take-Two to also close down the third-party servers for GTA V that would allow people to play online with one another using mods in completely separate servers. The multiplayer modded servers were setup as an alternative, since mods were banned on the official servers.
Some people believe that this is Take-Two’s way of killing off modding for GTA V just so that they can open up their own paid modding service and monetize it, similar to Bethesda’s Creation Club.
