Due to the cease and desist letter Open IV received from Take-Two Interactive on 05 June, the modding tool will no longer be available. The announcement by Open IV said that they decided not to go to court because "spending time just to restore status quo is really unproductive".
Open IV creators recently received a cease and desist letter from Grand Theft Auto publisher, Take-Two Interactive. As a result, the modding tool program will be shut down. The announcement on their page starts with the words: "We feared that this day would come… And now it’s here. The day, when GTA modding was declared illegal."
Open IV announcement continued by stating that they had always known modding was a "gray zone". The organisation said that they "had tried to play as nice as possible and even more". They went on to list the the rules of modding they have complied with during the period of almost ten years:
- Strictly following of Civil Code of Russia (only reverse engineering for interoperability).
- Only clean-room reverse engineering.
- No distribution of original data and code.
- And absolutely no messing with Online
OpenIV Team
In spite all that, they received an official cease and desist letter on 05 June. The letter says that with OpenIV they "allow third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify that software in violation Take-Two’s rights".
They overlooked the grammatical errors and proceeded to mull over the best course of action. Some ten days later they announced that they are shutting down distribution of OpenIV.
They could have gone to court but decided against the action as it would "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."
They closed the with a quote by Douglas Adams: "So long, and thanks for all the fish."
Steam
The upcoming " " total conversion modification has also been forced to stop development.
However, fans of the franchise, and the Open IV modding tool have taken the matter into their own hands and are trying to make things right. Hundreds of negative reviews were left on GTA V . Also Take-Two Interactive's stock has taken a slight dip since the news broke.
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