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.
