Take-Two has been issuing takedowns for GTA mods
Vice Cry and GTA: Underground are among the popular mods taken offline.
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Earlier this year, Rockstar's parent company Take-Two Interactive played takedown whack-a-mole withreverse-engineered versions of Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City. The publisher has apparently gone further in the last week or so, issuing DMCA takedown notices for GTA 5 map mods likeVice City Overhaul, as well as multiple popular mods for earlier games in the series.
GTA: Liberty City was a total conversion that brought the setting of GTA 3 into Vice City's engine, and was first released in 2005. It's no longer available on ModDB.Vice Cry, which replaced Vice City's textures and models with higher-resolution versions, is also gone. So isGTA: Underground, which combined the maps of not just GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, but those of other Rockstar games Bully, Manhunt, and Manhunt 2, then added gang warfare. So are the mods converting San Andreas into ports of console-exclusivesLiberty City Stories andVice City Stories. And that's not all.
A thread onGTAForums has been cataloguing the removals, as well as noting thatRockstar's statement on singleplayer mods, initially made during theback-and-forth over modding tool OpenIV in 2017, and which many modders have been assuming would protect their work, was quietly updated in 2019. It now notes that it does not apply to either the "use or importation of other IP (including other Rockstar IP) in the project" or "making new games, stories, missions, or maps". Neither of those clauses was in the original version of Rockstar's statement, which has been excluded from theWayback Machine, but can still be read in ournews story from the time.
As for why Take-Two has decided to go after these mods now—one of which, it's worth saying again, is 16 years old—the internet is currently split between two theories. One, that it's because they're seen as competition for hypothetical remastered versions of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. And two, that it's connected to recentrumors about GTA 6.
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