'Grand Theft Auto V' Players Lash Out With Negative Reviews Over Mod Tool Shutdown
"Grand Theft Auto V" players are up in arms over the move by Rockstar Games' parent company Take-Two that led to the shutdown of a popular modding tool for the game. The Steam reviews for the game took the brunt of the protest, as the label for the recent review average has become "overwhelmingly negative."
The Steam page for "Grand Theft Auto V" has become a target for players angry with Take-Two, as the user reviews for the game continue to plummet. As of this time, the "Recent" user reviews now has the label "Overwhelmingly Negative," while the "Overall" rating is described as "Mixed."
The game used to enjoy high review scores, before the award-winning title got hit with a wave of negative ratings. Just 13 percent of the more than 42,000 user reviews submitted for the game in the past 30 days have been positive, according to Gamespot.
The majority of the recent negative reviews have notes related to the shutdown of OpenIV, a set of mod tools that allow players to customize "Grand Theft Auto V" in a variety of ways.
OpenIV is one of the popular modding programs available for "Grand Theft Auto." A lead developer for the program has recently revealed the series of events that led to the shutdown of the mod tool, which started from an email sent by Take-Two Interactive.
According to the forum post by the mod tool developer, the group received an official Cease-and-Desist letter, presumably from the legal team of Take-Two. The message stated the reason behind the takedown notice, alleging that the mod tool "allow third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify that software in violation Take-Two's rights".
The development team of OpenIV, at that point, opted to close shop instead of fighting the letter by legal means. "Going to court will take at least few months of our time and huge amount of efforts, and, at best, we'll get absolutely nothing," the team explained.
"So, we decided to agree with their claims and we're stopping distribution of OpenIV," the team, as posted by user GooD-NTS on the "Grand Theft Auto" forums, concluded.
