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Stories about: "rockstar"

Nvidia Embraces Modding Community For ‘Half Life 2’ Project, Valve Apparently Cool With It

from the mod-squad dept

It’s always nice when you get several stories in a row that contrast with one another in order to make a point. We were just discussing Rockstar’s decision to scoop up a roleplaying and modding community in order to build in new and interesting ways to play GTA and Red Dead Redemption games. What I had hoped out loud would be a sign that Rockstar was turning over a new leaf on modding communities was dashed almost immediately as the company then went after another group of mod-makers for the crime of being fans of its games and trying to make them more interesting and playable. Game companies don’t have to do this sort of thing.

And that is now evidenced by Nvidia’s recent announcement that it has partnered with four different modding communities to push out a new graphically updated version of Half-Life 2, with Valve’s silence on the announcement serving as its tacit endorsement.

Awkwardly titled Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project, the remaster is currently in development with no set release date. Nvidia announced it today as part of its pre-Gamescom presentations. The remaster will use RTX Remix, which is Nvidia’s toolkit for bringing ray-tracing to classic PC games. RTX Remix was previously announced using The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind as an example; it seeks to give community modders and hobbyists the ability to do ray-tracing conversions for old games, but it’s still only available to a few people.

The people, in this case, are a group of modders from multiple community projects who have banded together under the name Orbifold Studios. The team includes modders who worked on VR Half-Life 2 project Project 17, asset remastering project Half-Life 2 Remade Assets, total conversation mod Raising the Bar: Redux, and another VR mod simply called Half-Life 2 VR, among others.

There has been no public statement I’m aware of by Valve on this project, but it has been made very clear in industry publications that the company behind the original game series has nothing to do with the actual making of this remake. That being said, the company is said to be very aware of the project. Therefore, while I’d love to see a full-throated endorsement of the modding community doing this sort of thing from Valve, its silence and a company like Nvidia’s involvement sure seems to indicate that the company isn’t going to disappear this whole thing.

This thing just kicked off into development, so I suppose there would still be time for Valve to reverse course, but I doubt it will, mostly because I highly doubt Nvidia would announce this at all if there was even a chance that Valve would nix the project. So why is it that Valve can see the usefulness in fan projects like this, but Rockstar can’t?

Filed Under: half life 2, modding, video games
Companies: nvidia, rockstar, steam

Sigh: Rockstar Goes Right Back To Its War On Mods

from the about-face dept

Well, that was quick. We had just been discussing the encouraging news that Rockstar had scooped up Cfx.re, a community dedicated to roleplaying within GTA and Red Dead Redemption games, as well as several mods made within that community. The only thing that made this newsworthy at all is that Rockstar has had an awful reputation when it comes to modding communities for its games. In that post, I highlighted the welcome change of the embrace of these mods and wondered aloud if this meant there had been a culture shift at Rockstar towards embracing more of these communities.

Commenters warned me that that was unlikely to be true. Well, it appears you win, commenters, because just days later Rockstar is disappearing another very cool and useful looking mod that serves only to make its game more attractive, especially this far into the sales cycle.

In case you thought Rockstar Games’ acquisition of Grand Theft Auto V creator group Cfx.re meant a brave new era for open modding in the hit open-world game, don’t worry, publisher Take-Two is still going after fan projects it doesn’t like. Case in point is its recent sacking of a mod called Sentient Streets, which used AI technology to generate NPC conversation dialogue on the fly. Take-Two had the mod scoured from both YouTube and NexusMods, leaving its creator confused and discouraged.

The Sentient Streets mod, which was previously covered by a number of sites like IGN and Eurogamer, had a story that revolved around an AI-worshiping death cult and NPCs whose dialogue was randomly generated by a tool called the Inworld Character Engine. YouTube user Bloc, who created the GTA V mod, said a video showing it off had over 100,000 views before it was removed, while the mod itself had apparently been downloaded over 3,000 times before NexusMods, where it was hosted, took it down.

As the post goes on to note, part of the issue here might be the use of a third-party platform called Inworld Character Engine, which populates the dialogue randomly generated by the mod with AI-generated dialogue built off of samples and audio the makers of that engine paid for. There is a chance that part of the concern is over whether Rockstar could find itself in some legal quagmire as a result of not policing this mod into oblivion.

But I doubt it. Rockstar’s reputation towards mods generally makes the case for Occam’s Razor. The least complicated explanation for this is that Rockstar is just Rockstar-ing. Which ultimately just sucks for Rockstar’s modding communities, most of which are made up of folks who are huge fans of the company’s games.

“Knowing that large corporations can issue strikes based on arbitrary reasons, which can cause your work to go in vain in moments, is also discouraging to say the least,” Bloc wrote in their post.

Indeed.

Filed Under: grand theft auto, modding community, mods, sentient streets
Companies: rockstar, take two interactive

Rockstar Scoops Up Modding, Roleplay Communities In A Departure From Previous Policy

from the modding-their-behavior dept

It’s important coming into this story to know and note that Rockstar, the publisher behind hit franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, has waged a very public war on modding communities for its games for years now. Despite just how useful these modding communities tend to be in elongating the sales cycle for video games, Rockstar has gone after the tools for making mods for its games, has banned players for using mods even when those mods don’t change online gameplay, has DMCA blitzed the mods themselves, and so on. It’s a very purposeful series of actions clearly based on company policy.

Company policy that is perhaps undergoing some level of change. As Rockstar prepares for the release of GTA 6, the company also scooped up a community of dedicated fans of GTA and Red Dead Redemption 2, a community which has formed around roleplaying within those games and using all kinds of mods.

The team behind the biggest Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 role-playing communities, Cfx.re, is officially becoming part of Rockstar Games. The new partnership comes ahead of the possible launch of GTA VI in 2024, and will lead to an updated policy that officially allows the addition of mods created in the FiveM and RedM communities to the hit open-world games.

“Over the past few years, we’ve watched with excitement as Rockstar’s creative community have found new ways to expand the possibilities of Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, particularly through the creation of dedicated roleplay servers,” Rockstar wrote in an August 11 blog post on its website. “As a way to further support those efforts, we recently expanded our policy on mods to officially include those made by the roleplay creative community.”

Despite Rockstar’s reputation on communities like this, this is really cool in a couple of different ways. The minor reversal or allowance on mods will get the headline, and it’s certainly deserving of attention. For a company like Rockstar to relinquish some small amount of control in this manner when it has been so staunchly against mods isn’t insignificant.

And perhaps it goes hand in hand with the other cool thing about all of this: Rockstar embracing a fan community that is doing new and interesting things with its titles.

In addition to allowing users to make all sorts of mods for GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2, the Cfx.re team’s FiveM and RedM clients are also the nexus for massive role-playing communities around the games who use dedicated servers to make elaborate worlds where individual players take on various roles from criminal and civilian to create a more authentic online open world experience.

“This is a huge step forward in the growth of our community, and an opportunity for us to work with Rockstar Games to advance the FiveM platform and the creative community surrounding it,” Cfx.re wrote in a statement. “While our day-to-day operations won’t have any noticeable changes, with Rockstar’s support, we are going to continue to improve our platform and we are truly excited for what this means for our users, community, and creators!”

This doesn’t mean that Rockstar has definitely done a complete one-eighty when it comes to mods and these fan communities, but it’s a start at the very least. And we should appreciate that shifting this kind of company policy in a company as large as Rockstar is a bit like turning the Titanic.

In that context, Rockstar should be encouraged to do more of this and really open things up, allowing its greatest fans to make its properties more valuable through their fandom.

Filed Under: fan communities, fan mods, fans, fivem, modding, mods, redm, role playing, video game mods, video games
Companies: rockstar

Take-Two, Rockstar Continue DMCA Blitzing Mods And Save Games For GTA

from the mod-squad dept

Usually when a company does something that results in a public backlash, that company will stop digging holes. Over the summer, we wrote about Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, starting a war on modding communities for the Grand Theft Auto series. After years of largely leaving the modding community alone, these companies suddenly started targeting mods that were chiefly designed to put content or locations for older GTA games into GTA5. While the public was left to speculate as to why Take-Two and Rockstar were doing this, the theory that perhaps it meant they were planning to release remastered versions of older games eventually turned out to be true when GTA Trilogy was announced. In other words, these companies were happy to reap all the benefits of an active modding community right up to the point where they thought they could make more money through a re-release, at which point the war began.

And, as we also covered recently, the PC release for GTA Trilogy went roughly as horribly you can imagine. While the game was released and purchased by many, mere days afterwards Take-Two not only delisted those games from marketplaces, but also experienced “unscheduled maintenance” on Rockstar’s game launcher, meaning owners of that game and several other Rockstar games couldn’t play the games they’d bought. That eventually got corrected several days later, but it was a terrible look, especially when combined with how little information Rockstar provided the public as it was going on. Many paying customers were very, very angry.

So, did Take-Two and Rockstar reverse course? Nope! Instead, it seems that the war on the modding community is only accelerating.

On November 11, according to the folks over at the GTA modding site LibertyCity, Take-Two contacted them and used DMCA strikes to remove three different GTA-related mods. The three removed mods are listed below:

-GTA Advance PC Port Beta 2

-The Lost and Damned Unlocked for GTA 4

-GTA IV EFLC The Lost And Damned (65%)

So, what are those mods? Well, the first is a fan project to take the contents and storyline of GTA Advance, a Gameboy Advance game, and porting them into the GTA3 engine. So, again, a retro game port. The second is a simple mod that allows a player to play GTA4 as a different protagonist character from some DLC. Why Rockstar felt this mod is a threat is beyond me. And the third, GTA IV EFLC The Lost And Damned, is simply a save file for that DLC with 65% of the game completed. It’s not a mod at all and so it is completely unclear why this would have been targeted for a DMCA takedown, unless Rockstar wants to argue that publishing a save file is somehow copyright infringement.

But since it is happening and, just like like last time, Take-Two and Rockstar aren’t bothering to communicate about any of this, it’s all left to speculation.

Because of what happened last time, some are speculating that these takedowns are evidence that a GTA IV remaster might be coming sometime in the future. According to sources who have spoken to Kotaku in the past about Rockstar’s future remasters, GTA IV as well as Red Dead Redemption remasters are possible. Though plans can and do change and with the recent backlash facing the GTA remasters, Rockstar might be more hesitant to greenlight future re-releases.

Regardless of if these takedowns are evidence of a future GTA IV remaster or not, it still is a frustrating situation for modders and community devs who have spent decades improving, porting, and maintaining the classic GTA games, allowing fans to play them years after Rockstar had moved on. Kotaku spoke to some modders who seemed fed up with Rockstar and many more have moved on to other games from other companies, worried about the potential legal pitfalls for continuing to mod Grand Theft Auto titles.

And so the modding community for Rockstar games gets at least a little less vibrant. Maybe the company is fine with that, but they damned well shouldn’t be. As we’ve discussed for years, modding communities are great for game companies. They keep old games fresh, keep up interest in older games, make old and new games more interesting and appealing by inputting new content, and basically work almost solely to provide free content to game companies as labors of love.

Why Rockstar and Take-Two would want to bite this hand that very much feeds them is a mystery to me.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, gta, modding, retro games, takedowns
Companies: rockstar, take two interactive

One Developer Gets GTA3 And Vice City Source Code Un-DMCAd On GitHub

from the rockstar dept

The strange flip-flop by Rockstar Games on being open and cool with its fans continues. By way of context and a bit of throat clearing, recall that Rockstar is both the company that whipped out the ban-hammer on Grand Theft Auto 5 players over the use of mods, and the company that paid out money to a modder that fixed that same games long loading times. In addition, Rockstar is both the company that happily used intellectual property to try to silence a documentary while also being the company that enthusiastically embraced gamers making short films out of GTA footage.

In other words, when it comes to being open with the gaming and modding community surrounding its games, Rockstar has something of a dual personality. The restrictive side of the company is the one that showed up early in 2021 when a bunch of GTA fans managed to reverse engineer the source code for GTA3 and GTA: Vice City.

Deriving the source code through reverse-engineering was a huge milestone for the GTA hacking scene. Players would still need the original game assets to run either classic GTA title, but with accessible source code, modders and devs could begin porting the game to new platforms or adding new features. That’s exactly what’s happened this past year with Super Mario 64.

A week after the code went public on GitHub, Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, issued a DMCA takedown claiming that the reversed-engineered source code contained “copyrighted materials owned by Take-Two.” GitHub pulled the fan-derived code and all its related forks.

Entirely too often, that would be the end of the story. Modders and enthusiasts go out and try to do something cool with a Rockstar game, get their hands slapped, and give it all up. That didn’t happen in this case. Instead, one developer out of New Zealand, named Theo, issued a counter-notice to GitHub. Theo’s notice explained that, no, the code that had been produced did not contain the original work done by Rockstar. Instead, this was all brand new coding done by these fan-developers to produce essentially the same game. As Theo explained, this new code functions like the original source code, but is not identical.

As of now, Theo’s fork has been restored to GitHub. And, now, everyone waits to see if Rockstar wants to turn this all into an actual legal battle or not.

While it’s possible Take-Two could challenge Theo’s counter-claim in court at a later date, this is still a nice win for the Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City modding scene. It’s also another reminder that modders, pirates, and fan developers are often the only ones doing the work to keep old games around in an easily playable form.

One would hope Rockstar would see the wisdom in letting this go. It seems hard to imagine how this reverse-engineered code and it allowing modders to try and do new and interesting things with two games that are 20 years old at this point could somehow be a serious threat to Rockstar. More to the point, this is an opportunity for the company to instead embrace and encourage its fans to do these new and interesting things, potentially keeping alive the interest in these games and the franchise as a whole.

As to whether Rockstar will see the wisdom in that, well, for now we wait.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, gta, gta3, source code
Companies: rockstar

Modder Solves 'GTA Online' Loading Time Problem, Gets Paid By Rockstar For It

from the mods-are-your-friend dept

When it comes to how the video game industry interacts with modding communities, it can be frustrating just how often companies see modders as a menace. Nintendo has a long, long history of treating mods as a threat to its control, but it is certainly not alone. But modding by and large is not a threat to game makers. Actually, it’s a boon. Mods tend to make games more interesting to more people and can often lengthen the lifecycle of a particular game.

And sometimes a mod can simply fix a game. That is what a coder, going by the name t0st, did for the long loading times in Grand Theft Auto Online.

A couple of weeks ago, we reported that a Grand Theft Auto Online player sick of the game’s notoriously long load times took matters into his own hands, broke out the disassembler, and crafted his own fix. The long load times were due to the inefficient way that the GTA Online developers chose to parse and then sort the data in a large multi-megabyte JSON file.

The fix—created by a coder known as t0st—resulted in a 70-ish percent decrease in loading times, going by t0st’s own informal benchmarks. For players suffering from the JSON parsing issue, this means that they only have to wait perhaps one or two minutes to enter a GTA Online game, rather than the six-plus minutes they were previously stuck watching the loading screen.

Now, it’s easy to see how Rockstar Games could have handled this poorly. The company could have chosen to feel embarrassed by this modder fixing its product. It could have simply seen a change in coding for its game through a mod as a threat. It could have claimed that all of this was unauthorized and therefore copyright infringement.

Instead, Rockstar reached out to t0st, reviewed his work, and paid him for it.

In the two weeks since t0st’s fix was made public, GTA Online developer Rockstar got in contact with t0st and acknowledged that t0st had indeed fixed a legitimate issue with the game and that he’d be receiving a $10,000 payment under Rockstar’s bug bounty program.

It’s worth noting that there is no indication t0st did this work because of the bounty program. He or she appears to simply be a fan of the game but not the loading times. By not seeing everything through a prism of control, Rockstar got its game fixed.

All of this serves as a reminder that the biggest fans of good content can be the biggest contributors to that content in ways that mean more interest and sales for the game. If you let them.

Filed Under: bug bounty, gta, gta online t0st, modders, support
Companies: rockstar

from the free-as-in-advice dept

The Epic Store is still around, still rocking its exclusivity deals with game publishers, and is still trying really hard to unseat Valve’s Steam as the dominant PC gaming platform of choice. Truthfully, the news about the ongoing battle between Steam and Epic has sort of quieted down. That ultimately is probably not a good sign for Epic. If there is unseating to be done, it’s going to have to be done loudly, publicly, and with much coverage in the press.

Which is perhaps why Epic recently decided to strike a deal with Rockstar to give away Grand Theft Auto 5 for free. Yes, free as in you pay no money and yet own the game forever. Rockstar’s reasoning behind this is quite easy to understand: the company already made a hilarious sum of money selling the game for nearly a decade and the game’s ecosystem and players have since moved into the online MMO realm where the game now makes hilarious sums of money via microtransactions. More players means more revenue for Rockstar.

And for the Epic Store, this is sort of free game is a great way to entice gamers to your store, gin up a chunk of new user adoption, and really show the public how great your PC games store performs–, oh son of a bitch.

The Epic Games Store went offline on Thursday morning as users anticipating the launch of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 5 for free on the platform overloaded its servers. News of the game’s free release leaked early on Wednesday on the Epic Games Store Twitter account.

The website and launcher both went down just before 11 a.m. EDT, when the Premium Edition of the game for Windows PC was scheduled to go live. “We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store,” Epic Games said on Twitter.

On the one hand: yay, the strategy worked and tons of people flocked to the Epic Store to get the free game. On the other hand: crap, the strategy also backfired, because now a whole bunch of people’s first impression of the store is that it’s unstable and cannot support the public demand. Whoops.

This seems to be something of a trend for Epic. Great on the marketing and PR messaging, much less great on the execution. And quite frankly, it’s not as though Epic shouldn’t have known it was going to have a stampede on its hands.

Despite being six and a half years old, GTA 5 is clearly still popular. It goes beyond just the game being available for free, too: 2019 was one of Rockstar Games’ best sales years for GTA 5. GTA 5 was initially released in September 2013 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and again in 2014 on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. In 2015, it came to Windows PC. With the PC launch, the game found a new audience with the modding scene and in Grand Theft Auto Online. The game’s popularity on Twitch ballooned in the past year with role-playing servers in GTA Online.

Now, as of the time of this writing, 2pm CST, the problems seem to have been fixed. I know this because I went and got the game for free myself, even though I already own it on my console. And, while this was my first time on the Epic Store myself, you’ll have to go elsewhere for my take on how good or bad the store itself is.

But as for this marketing strategy by Epic? I give it a meh.

Filed Under: epic store, gta 5, overwhelmed, video game stores, video games
Companies: epic, rockstar

Rockstar Whips Out The Ban-Hammer On GTAV Players Over Mod

from the bans-on-fans dept

There’s something a bit strange going on over at Rockstar Games. The makers of the Grand Theft Auto series have reportedly banned several players in the past week, all of them associated with a particular GTA5 game mod called “FiveM.” Rockstar’s reasoning for the ban will sound familiar to many observers of gaming in the online space.

Last week, Rockstar banned a number of Grand Theft Auto V players associated with the “FiveM” mod, which offers players an online playspace separate from the game’s official “Grand Theft Auto: Online” mode. Yesterday, a Rockstar representative told Ars that the bans were made because the mod is “an unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy.”

This is the increasingly common refrain from companies handing out bans for online games for players that develop things like cracks, which are designed to allow those pirating the game to participate in the online portion of the game. Were you to not dig into the story any further, you’d likely assume that’s exactly what was going on, given that Rockstar raised the piracy boogeyman in its statement.

Except FiveM doesn’t appear to be anything remotely resembling a crack at all. Instead, FiveM appears to be a mod with its own launcher that allows GTA5 players to play online on dedicated servers, with a relaxed stance on player mods being used in the online experience. The whole point of FiveM is that Rockstar doesn’t allow mods in its official online experience, so the modders created their own online play-space where mods would be allowed.

“FiveM is not a crack for GTA V nor does it actively try to facilitate piracy,” said Qais Patankar, who goes by qaisjp online. While Patankar didn’t contribute code to the FiveM mod directly, he says he was caught up in Rockstar’s bans for promoting the mod through online channels like Reddit. Patankar argues that those behind FiveM shouldn’t be penalized just because the mod fails to check if the underlying game is a legitimate copy. “Whilst the mod doesn’t prevent people who have illegally obtained the game to play FiveM, it does not behave like a crack: [it doesn’t] bypass the verification system so that you can play the game without paying,” he said.

While Rockstar’s stated policy does ban “online” mods (as opposed to mods to the single-player game), Patankar argues that FiveM shouldn’t be targeted by a policy designed to prevent cheating in a centralized playspace. “There’s different ways you can ‘spin’ this,” he said. “FiveM is a mod that works online, but it doesn’t modify anything in the [core] online experience. It does mod online code, and it does utilize online things, but it does not affect [GTA:O].”

And that changes how we see Rockstar’s statement. Instead of banning players for facilitating piracy in the common way we typically see it, this sure does look like Rockstar banning modders for creating an online GTA experience that might in some way compete with its own. That this separate online space was developed specifically for players that want to play the game online differently than Rockstar allows seems to suggest that even the worry over competition is theoretical at best, since these are players using mods that Rockstar doesn’t want used.

But the strangest part of the story is that one of the developers of the mod reportedly is suggesting that Rockstar sent private investigators to his home, apparently just to scare him.

So I just got a pair of PIs at my door claiming to be sent by Take Two, handing me a phone with a person somewhere in the UK or US or whatever to ‘discuss how to cease my activities with regard to Grand Theft Auto’, that ‘they know what happened before with Activision and want to not get the lawyers involved at this time’, however they ‘have tested their legal standing already and are quite certain of their point’ and ‘aren’t willing to accept any solution other than ceasing my activiites’. Oh, they also ‘couldn’t disclose any conversations they’re having with other modification developers’, didn’t want to talk about general modification policy as ‘it was just about my case’ and admitted they ‘looked through my source code’.

Is a little mod that creates a unique GTA: Online experience really so terrifying that Rockstar felt the need to send the Stasi knocking on the modder’s door? How about just offer another online experience that allows mods? Why is that the more difficult route to go, compared with hiring PIs and raising the piracy boogeyman?

Filed Under: gtav, mods, video games
Companies: rockstar

The GTA 5 Wildlife Documentary Is Why Rockstar Was Smart To Embrace Fan Films

from the fan-works dept

When Rockstar released its own video editor for Grand Theft Auto 5, the move in and of itself received only mild applause. People have been using video games to make entirely transformative works for some time now. More important was the signal that Rockstar was sending: use our game to make fan films. This is smart for any number of reasons, but allowing fans to use games as they see fit makes those games more valuable to the market, and those transformative works ultimately only serve to advertise the original game in the first place. It’s a win for everyone, in other words.

Well, what started in GTA 4 has moved on into GTA 5. One example is a recently released fake documentary about the wildlife in the GTA 5 universe. With the exception of some of the extreme closeups, the whole thing has impressive production values, and the voiceovers and music are spot on for the genre.

The creatures of GTA V all lead secret lives that we often never get to see while playing. They hunt. They eat. They try to survive. 8-BIT BASTARD and Chaney555 tap into all of that with their latest GTA documentary, “Onto The Land.” It’s an impressive 15 minute video that took 6 months to research and develop, something which is pretty obvious when you look at the quality at display.

I think the most striking part of this fan film is just what the technology of a video game allows a third party to create. We’ve talked for some time about how the barriers for generating all kinds of media are shortening, or becoming non-existent. That includes creative film. This video, which took a mere six months to make and was a labor of love for essentially one individual, ought to serve notice of exactly what kind of impressive work can be done simply operating inside a video game.

Additionally, you have to think that Rockstar is loving this. The company’s game gets all kinds of free publicity, the filmmaker gets to create his work inside of the game, and the public gets to enjoy the fun that results. All because a content producer decided to unshackle its content and embrace fan-works.

Filed Under: copyright, creativity, documentary, fan films, gta
Companies: rockstar

from the stealing-the-show dept

If you pay any attention to Valve’s Steam platform, you’ve probably already at least heard about the hot-selling game NotGTAV. The game, just to be clear, is not Grand Theft Auto 5. It’s actually not even close. It’s a parody game, built to play more like a clone of Snake or something similar. But it is most certainly not GTA5. And nothing in the game is GTA5 either. Here’s how the developers of the game explain themselves:

This game is a parody. It is definitely, positively and (hopefully) legally, not the game Grand Theft Auto Five. Sure, it’s called NotGTAV, but those letters stand for Great Traffic Adventure and the V is silent. Like the one in “lawsuit” (which, you’ll notice, is also invisible).

This short tour of the glories of the UK’s M4 corridor is easy to play, hard to master, addictive, very funny, and cheap. 100% of the profits from this game go to young people’s charity Peer Productions. Without Peer Productions the NotGames team would never have met. By buying this game you can help us pay something back.

Now, a parody game would be protected as fair use and going legal on a game that is built specifically to give money to charity would be a public relations nightmare. Not that any of that kept the game from being removed from Steam over a copyright claim, of course. The inevitable claim came and Steam took the game down from the marketplace. Everyone immediately thought that Rockstar games had been the one issuing the takedown, even though the fact that the GTA series essentially relies on parody to exist and survive the lawsuits idiotic celebrities have levied against the company. Indeed, when Steam informed the developers of the takedown, its notice named an employee of Rockstar as the complainant. And so the developers put their plan B into effect.

“We’re currently in the process of getting our game back on Steam, by re-branding to NotDMCAV,” Kendall said earlier today, shortly after NotGTAV’s removal from Steam. “The issue that Rockstar took was with the usage of ‘the Grand Theft Auto V acronym and title GTA’—apparently you can now own a series of letters, even it’s already a police crime in the first place. Our initial reaction was—and remains—that we’re protected under parody protection laws, and we’ve made it clear that we’re not accepting in any way, shape or form that we’ve infringed copyright, we’re just trying to be as compliant as possible right now.”

While I love some good snark as much as anyone, it turns out this good snark was wholly unneccessary. As the team worked to rebrand their hot-selling game, which involved a hell of a lot of work, they were also working with Steam to figure out just what the hell was going on. Turns out, Steam put the original title back in the marketplace having found that the complaint from “Rockstar” was actually “bullshit.”

In what has quickly become the weirdest day of our lives, and one of the most hectic, we’ve just received news from Valve that the plaintiff of our DMCA is now being treated as a false complainant.

NotGTAV lives!!!!!!

We’re half-way through rebranding the game as NotDMCAV, and the store page we’ve designed gives us a huge giggle, so we’re leaving you some of our new artwork (you may be able to tell it was done in a bit of a hurry) for a couple of days but, as we’re not being sued, the name and game will be remaining the same.

So good on Rockstar for not filing this complaint and great for the developers, but all this shows is why the permission culture and takedown-first attitude make d-bags out of everyone else. The summary here, should you lose sight of it due to the NotGTAV folks’ awesome attitudes, is that some nobody put in a copyright claim that took their work off the market, caused them to begin work rebranding, even though that work wasn’t necessary, and then Steam put the game back up. In other words, the mere existence of the claim is all it took to keep the sales from rolling in, even if only temporarily. That’s bullshit. It’s a wonderful example of how copyright laws and the way that platforms like Steam choose to interact with those laws is a clamp on legitimate speech and art, not to mention tools for jerks to screw with content producers.

Filed Under: games, gta, notdmcav, notgtav, parody, takedown
Companies: rockstar, valve