Rockstar celebrates official GTA mod support by nuking non-official mod platform

GTA Online — (Image credit: Rockstar Games)

Around a month ago Rockstar launched an official mod shop for Grand Theft Auto Online, with Cfx Marketplace coming three years after the studio's 2023 acquisition of Cfx.re, a GTA and Red Dead Redemption modding team. This is obviously something of a dry run for the company before the all-conquering arrival of GTA 6, with a new GTA Online presumably not far behind: Rockstar has seen that Roblox money, and would sure like some of it.

Now, and perhaps inevitably, comes the news that the GTA 5 multiplayer platform alt:V Multiplayer is going to be closing down this summer after nine years, apparently after Rockstar owner Take-Two started making threatening noises in its direction. The alt:V team describe their work as "a free modification for Grand Theft Auto 5 that lets you play on dedicated servers with custom gamemodes." In other words roleplay servers, and yes that's pretty similar to what FiveM offers.

"This is not an easy message to write," writes alt:V team member Vadzz on Discord (thanks, GamesRadar+). "For the past nine years, we've been building alt:V—starting as a small side project and growing into a full-scale multiplayer platform used by hundreds of servers and thousands of players around the world. It's been years of solving hard problems and trying new ideas."

The PLA referenced in the shutdown message was updated last month alongside the official launch of Cfx.re, so this seems related, though in all honesty the site will have been on Rockstar's radar for years. Rockstar and Take Two are traditionally hostile to modders, and indeed before it bought FiveM accused them of hosting code to "facilitate piracy", and banned three of the main creators from Rockstar games.

Rockstar's policy changed in 2022 as someone over there woke up to how potentially profitable the whole GTA modding and roleplay scene is. For a while it allowed non-commercial roleplay servers, as long as they didn't interfere with official services, but it looks like those days may be behind us.

Unfortunately them's the risks when you mod the biggest game on the planet. The next GTA Online will make more money than Croesus, and Take-Two wants as much of it as possible. Which is fine, but it absolutely sucks that the company feels the need to shut down what is a relatively niche community: as I look at alt:V now, there are just under 750 people playing on various servers. Alt:V doesn't exactly feel like something that was ever going to stop Strauss Zelnick from buying another ivory backscratcher, but RIP anyway.

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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

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