His mod for GTA 5 breathed new life into the NPCs. Now the creator feels compelled to erase all traces of it from the internet and is upset about Take-Two’s actions.
What kind of mod is this? With Sentient Streets, artificial intelligence was used to talk to the NPCs from Los Santos via voice chat with your microphone. They then used real voices for the conversations. This way, you could choose a colleague as a police officer, send him a question via voice chat, and the AI would interpret this and generate an answer. But now that’s all over, as the creator removed his mod after a copyright issue on YouTube.
Why Take-Two’s actions are so frustrating for him and conflict with what Rockstar Games believes in, he explains in a statement.
Sudden copyright problems and lack of communication
This is what the creator writes: The Sentient Streets mod can no longer be found on the Nexus Mods website. A YouTube video that showcased the mod also disappeared. The creator Bloc even deleted the mod that was hosted on GTA 5 Mods. The deletion of the mods happened after Take-Two had the YouTube video taken down.
“Take-Two Interactive gave my channel a copyright strike for the GTA mod, and YouTube immediately removed the video without giving me a chance to explain myself. No one from Take-Two Interactive contacted me beforehand or asked anything; they just removed the video out of nowhere.”
To discuss the matter, Bloc sent an email to the address shown with the copyright strike. However, there has been no response so far. He hopes it’s just a minor misunderstanding or that they could at least explain the reasoning to him. Because according to Bloc, the reason for the strike is that he used GTA 5 as software in the video.
I would be willing to speak with a contact person from Take-Two about this if they would just send me an email. Instead, they chose a non-communicative approach. If the true reason for this takedown is really that I used GTA V in the video, then one might ask, if using GTA V in the video is a reason for a copyright strike, how is it possible that there are millions of YouTube videos showing Let’s Play videos or just gameplay without problems for over a decade? Unfortunately, this seems to be an excuse to attack the mod and take a stand against it. What seems puzzling to me, considering that the mod itself is both FREE and open-source.
[…] Of course, I can appeal through the YouTube dispute system, but that leads to an escalation with the authorities. I am a solo modder doing this for fun in my spare time; I do not have the means to defend myself legally in this situation. Honestly, I don’t want to spend any time on this either.
The background: There has long been a difficult atmosphere between Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and the modding community. Mod creators have repeatedly complained about having to take their mods offline. Even content that posed no problem for 10 years suddenly had to be taken offline.
Just a few days ago, there was an exciting turn of events, when Rockstar Games brought the creators behind the FiveM mod onto the team. In August 2015, Rockstar banned three people who were responsible for the FiveM mod from the Social Club (via PCGamer). The reason was that it was an unauthorized multiplayer service.
What happens next? Bloc is upset about the situation and shows this with his blog post on YouTube. “As someone who grew up with the Grand Theft Auto series and enjoyed all the games over the years, this hostile attitude towards me and the mod is very discouraging. I hope that everyone who enjoyed this mod will remember this dishonest action by Take-Two.”
He then takes a shot at the company and says: “Instead of hunting small mods, Take-Two and Rockstar should focus on developing proper remakes with a better pricing policy or stop removing cars from GTA Online to sell them to others.”
With this, Bloc alludes to the fact that nearly 200 dealer cars were removed from the online mode, only to be offered exclusively to players with a GTA+ subscription.
He concludes his statement with a quote from Rockstar and leaves it open to the readers whether this action against his mod corresponds to these words:
“Rockstar Games has always believed in constructive fan creativity and wants to empower creators to express their passion for our games.”
Your opinion is important to us!
Do you like the article? Then let us know!