The modding community for Grand Theft Auto V might be back up and running following a recent update to the tool OpenIV. You may recall that Take-Two hit the developers of the tool with a cease and desist recently. The fact that OpenIV was updated is giving many reason to believe that the parties have reached common ground.
A couple of weeks ago, the developers of OpenIV announced that their modding tool would no longer be made available and that updates would come to a halt. This was on the heels of a legal order from Take-Two, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series. The series has been a big draw for modders over the past decade and the OpenIV tool was basically essential for making and loading those mods into games of Grand Theft Auto IV and GTA V.
According to earlier reports, Take-Two's reasons for taking action were pretty simple: The tool had recently been linked with mods that were used to harass players and also created some security risks for Take-Two. Whether or not the reasoning was sound, fans were none too happy with the sudden change of stance on modding.
So, of course, the petitions and virtual protests began to skyrocket, including a whole bunch of negative reviews of GTA V online. Even the game's developer, Rockstar, was cited as being on the side of reaching a new agreement rather than taking the modding tools away.
This weekend, PC Gamer is reporting that a new update rolled out to OpenIV, moving version 2.9 of the software to build from 906 to 907. As stated in the initial report, that wouldn't exactly be newsworthy on any other day. However, since the developers of OpenIV have stated that they intended to comply with Take-Two's request and stop updating/making the tool available, this has led many to believe that the two parties must have reached some sort of understanding. Why would the OpenIV team risk getting their butts sued off just to launch a small update otherwise?
While nothing official has been offered, the speculation now is that OpenIV is on its way back with the blessing, however reluctant, of Take-Two.
As far as we're concerned, this is probably how things should have gone down in the first place. Reaching out to the developers and working toward a compromise, especially if Take-Two had legitimate concerns, makes a lot more sense to us than calling for the immediate discontinuation of something that has helped build the GTA community for nearly a decade.
Then again, this kind of stuff is tricky as hell and we're not even going to pretend to understand all of the ins and outs of it. We don't know what Take-Two was up against due to the problem-causing OpenIV mods and a cease and desist may have been the quickest, most reasonable way to stop the bleeding before figuring out how to operate.
Either way, fingers crossed that the GTA community will be able to enjoy their mods again soon.
