Take-Two pulls two GTA Online mods amidst OpenIV fallout
Force Hax and Menyoo withdrawn, but OpenIV's community is fighting back against cease-and-desist order
Take-Two Interactive has ordered that two more Grand Theft Auto mods be withdrawn, with the makers of both offering to donate their sales revenue to charity.
Rockstar informed GamesIndustry.biz that the Force Hax cheat menu, which was sold to GTA players for $15 a month, is no longer available. The mod's Facebook and Twitter pages have both been deactivated, and the official website now features only a message of apology.
"After discussions with Take-Two Interactive, effective immediately we are ceasing all maintenance, development and distribution of the Force Hax cheat menu services. We will be donating all proceeds to charity and we apologize for any and all problems Force Hax services have caused to the Grand Theft Auto Online community."
According to PC Gamer, a second GTA Online cheat menu, Menyoo, has also been closed following an intervention from Take-Two's legal team. The mod's website now hosts a similar statement to the one issued by Force Hax, though Menyoo said that the charity to which it will donate its revenue was "designated by Take-Two."
These takedowns follow the withdrawal of OpenIV last week, which the OpenIV team interpreted as an attempt by Take-Two to crack down on all Grand Theft Auto mods. However, Rockstar later clarified that only mods that apply to GTA Online are under threat.
"Take-Two's actions were not specifically targeting single player mods," Rockstar said. "Unfortunately OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody."
Within the GTA community, there is a clear sense that the withdrawal of OpenIV is at best an unfortunate example of collateral damage, and at worst a pure injustice. A petition to reinstate the mod has now collected almost 50,000 signatures, while Grand Theft Auto V's Steam page has been inundated with bad user reviews.
The game's Overall user rating has now been dragged down to "Mixed" following almost 40,000 Recent user reviews are "Overwhelmingly Negative". The always helpful Steam Spy published a graph on Twitter that shows the impact of OpenIV's disgruntled audience on GTA V's user rating.