OpenIV is an incredibly powerful and popular modding tool that was used to create mods for the Grand Theft Auto series for nearly a decade now. Unfortunately, it would appear that its long reign has now finally ended as Take-Two Interactive has sent the developers a very serious (and very poorly written) cease and desist letter.

The lead developer behind OpenIV, GooD-NTS, released a brief statement explaining the whole situation. Long story short, there is no way a couple of modders can fight a giant company even though they believe the accusations leveled against them are baseless, so OpenIV sadly has to go. Here's the full quote:

"On June 5th, 2017, we had received an official Cease-and-Desist letter.

It clearly says, that with OpenIV we "allow third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify that software in violation Take-Two's rights".

Yes, this letter is illiterate both technically and grammatically (really, they don't even bothered with proof-reading the text).

Yes, we can go to court and yet again prove that modding is fair use and our actions are legal.

Yes, we could. But we decided not to.

 

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.

Spending time just to restore status quo is really unproductive, and all the money in the world can't compensate the loss of time.

So, we decided to agree with their claims and we're stopping distribution of OpenIV.

It was a hard decision, but when any modding activity has been declared illegal, we can't see any possibilities to continue this process, unless top management of Take-Two company makes an official statement about modding, which can be used in court.

 

With many thanks for all modding community for all your fantastic creations,

OpenIV team. 

So long, and thanks for all the fish."

Personally I find this whole situation to be incredibly confusing. OpenIV explicitly forbids players from entering online play with mods enabled, so the whole cheating angle Take-Two is trying to push is a bit of a stretch. It also doesn't help that GTA Online is infested with cheaters of all calibers, and has been since its very inception, with very few publisher or developer actions taken to prevent such game-disrupting activities. So with all of this in mind, what exactly is Take-Two trying to gain by shutting down its longest-running and most loyal modding community?

Hopefully this whole mess will be resolved in the near future because mods are something that benefits everyone: players get to toy around with new and potentially ridiculous ideas, and the developers get to keep their old games relevant for many, many years after release. It truly is a win-win scenario, so I'm really curious to see what sort of statement Take-Two is going to release in the next few days.