The popular Grand Theft Auto mod tool OpenIV has been shut down after the modders received a cease and desist letter from Take-Two Interactive.
One of the most popular Grand Theft Auto mod tool programs has ceased operations after it apparently received a cease and desist letter from Take-Two Interactive. The shutdown was announced in a post on twitter yesterday:
OpenIV was discontinued due to Take Two Interactive request.https://t.co/GZZk4G9WFf#OpenIV #GTAV #GTAIV #RDR #MaxPayne3 #modding #RIP— OpenIV (@OpenIV) June 14, 2017
There’s a bit longer message over on the OpenIV website. It opens with “We feared that this day would come… And now it’s here. The day, when GTA modding was declared illegal.”
The team says that it “tried to play as nice as possible” for “almost 10 years of development.” It stresses that it did not distribute the original data and code, and that it did not mess with GTA Online. Despite that, the team received a cease-and-desist letter on June 5.
The team decided not to go to court, because, “Going to court will take at least few months of our time and huge amount of efforts, and, at best, we’ll get absolutely nothing. Spending time just to restore status quo is really unproductive, and all the money in the world can’t compensate the loss of time.” Instead, the team agreed to their claims and stopped distribution of OpenIV.
There’s already a petition on Change.org asking Take-Two to pull back this decision, but as with most online petitions, it’s unlikely to have much of an impact.
