Grand Theft Auto modding
These unofficial modifications are made by altering gameplay logic and asset files within a user's game installation, and can change the player's experience to varying degrees.
[1] Third-party software has been indispensable for building Grand Theft Auto mods, due to the lack of official editing tools from the developer, Rockstar Games.
[citation needed] The use of a 3D game engine (the first in the series[3]) allowed development of custom vehicles, textures and character models, followed by new missions and map modifications; the success of these new types of mods started to attract widespread attention.
One of the best-known examples is the iCEnhancer graphics modification[4] for Grand Theft Auto IV by Hayssam Keilany, praised by reviewers and labelled as "arguably one of the best mods of all time" by Polygon.
In a quote by Patrick Wildenborg, the modder responsible for unlocking the Hot Coffee mini-game, he stated that "the modding community felt like a bunch of friends trying to solve a mystery".
FiveM, an alternative multiplayer and role-playing modification for Grand Theft Auto Online, amassed a concurrent player count of 250,000 on Steam in April 2021, surpassing that of the base game.
Grant's statements were met with criticism from the LSPDFR community, including a developer of one of the NSW Police mods, who said their content was harmless and that they "inspired kids to think of a career in the emergency services field".
Our primary focus is on protecting GTA Online against modifications that could give players an unfair advantage, disrupt gameplay, or cause griefing.
[32] The end-user licence agreement contradicts this however, as it states users may not "reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, display, perform, prepare derivative works based on, or otherwise modify the Software, in whole or in part".
[34] In August 2015, several members of the FiveM team had their Rockstar Games Social Club accounts suspended due to their involvement in an alternative multiplayer client for Grand Theft Auto V.[35][36][37] Upon being contacted by Kotaku regarding the issue, Rockstar stated that the FiveM client was an unauthorized modification "designed to facilitate piracy" and that as such, it violated the terms of use and therefore members were banned from the Social Club service.
[45] This claim was eventually refuted, as the mini-game's code and assets had been developed by Rockstar and were already present, unfinished and abandoned, on the game disc: the mod simply made the existing content available to players.
[42] A weapon replacement for GTA V, which replaces the game's sticky bomb weapon with an exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 as a parody of the phone's battery explosion issue and subsequent recall, attracted controversy when Samsung Electronics America, Inc. reportedly issued takedown notices to YouTube demanding that videos depicting the phone be taken down as an alleged violation of its copyrights.
[59] Although the details of said meeting remain undisclosed, shortly afterwards OpenIV was made available to download – and received a minor update – indicating the conversation with Rockstar was successful.
[60][61] The cease and desist led to a review bomb from users,[62] and caused a chilling effect with some mod developers discontinuing support for the game due to perceived legal ramifications with modding Grand Theft Auto V.[63] On 19 February 2021, representatives claiming to be from Take-Two Interactive sent DMCA takedown notices to the team behind re3 and reVC, which were source code recreations of Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City respectively, whose goal was a modernised and improved version of the games which can be ported and played on contemporary and future platforms.
The representatives alleged that the source code recreations were an act of copyright infringement, stating that "The work is not licensed in any way," and had their respective GitHub repositories taken down as a result.
[67] In September 2021, Take-Two filed a lawsuit in California against the programmers, asserting that they "are well aware that they do not possess the right to copy, adapt, or distribute derivative GTA source code, or the audiovisual elements of the games, and that doing so constitutes copyright infringement".
