Take-Two Shuts Down OpenIV, Cripples Modding

[insettasport]

Now, if you are even slightly familiar with the PC gaming community, you will likely heard of mods. Some of you may have already heard of this story as well.

For those who don't know, PC game mods allow the player to change the game however they like. Whether it's adding in a cool new sports car concept to the game, making a gun that fires sharks at people, or millions of other things.

So, onto the story, Rockstar Games' parent company, Take-Two Interactive, has shut down the modding tool OpenIV, which, as the name implies, came out originally for Grand Theft Auto IV and evolved into a tool for Grand Theft Auto V. On June 5, 2017 Take-Two sent the team behind OpenIV a cease and desist letter, and the OpenIV team complied and shut the project down.

There are a few theories of why this could have happened, and the one that I immediately think of is this: Damage control. Take-Two probably thought "oh, this tool is a danger to our game." But, there's a problem with that - Why not sooner? This product has been out for a decade. If Take-Two wanted to shut it down because it was a danger, they would have done years ago.

Here is a link to a news article from GameZone on the event: http://www.gamezone.com/news/take-two-declares-modding-for-grand-theft-auto-v-illegal-main-modding-tool-shut-down-3454656

Well, VGCollect forum users, what do you think? Do you support Take-Two for taking action on this tool or do you support OpenIV for making the game more open to customization?

[tripredacus]

The issue is all around the online portion of the game. Most people think that you should not mod online games and then try to use them on the normal servers. I highly doubt Take2 cares about what people do on single player. I'm pretty sure this is in response to the recent Kotaku article about people cheating on GTA V Online.

[kamikazekeeg]

It depends if the modding was affecting the online game.  I could understand it then if it was for that.  If it wasn't for that, then Take-Two are being absolutely terrible and doing a real disservice to their community.

*EDIT*
Watching Jim Sterling's video, it seems like Take Two has just gone and screwed up real bad.  OpenIV was not affecting their online game and shutting it down won't help the rampant hacking/cheating still going on in GTAV.  This does nothing but purposefully hurt their community and create a big PR mess.  Though reading another article, Rockstar, who was supportive of mods before, has said that they are supportive of this as OpenIV actually was causing a problem with the online environment due to malicious mods.  Doesn't seem to be a situation properly sorted out and perhaps if Rockstar works with the OpenIV developers, they can find a way to solve the issue.

*EDIT 2*
More for my own clarification, but now other people are calling Rockstar's message bullshit because OpenIV never affected multiplayer and others have said there are actually things in place to not allow that to happen, which comes back to Take Two simply strong arming the community for no good reason.