It appears that Rockstar Games is bringing its hammer down to everyone affiliated with a certain mod for GTA V, FiveM. FiveM is a multiplayer mod for GTA V which aims to offer an advanced multiplayer environment for people to play on dedicated servers with user-made game modes.
Now while this does sound cool, it can be easily considered a competitive – and as such a ‘not welcomed’ – mod to GTA Online. Rockstar is obviously trying to protect the game’s MP mode, therefore it was a given to ban the creator of this mod, NTAuthority. However, Rockstar has also banned people that were merely affiliated with FiveM and were not really involved with its development.
As Qais Patankar told us:
“I am not a developer of FiveM, I am just the mere moderator of the subreddit, but yes, I have some sort of affiliation with the mod. I was skeptical that we were banned (screenshot) for being contributors (in some way) to the FiveM project.”
Patankar continued and said that Rockstar banned two community members, even though they had not broken Rockstar’s Terms of Service or their EULA:
“They (Rockstar) have also singled out and banned community members who have not been involved in the development of the mod at all. Rockstar Games are banning people for simply being affiliated with the project – we have not broken their Terms of Service or their EULA at all.”
What’s also interesting here is that Rockstar banned these members from Social Club, meaning that players cannot play ANY game using that service. In other words, Max Payne 3 cannot be played if you’re banned from the Social Club.
And this is precisely where Rockstar is wrong, and why PC gamers are afraid of this whole ‘always-online’ thing that publishers are desperately trying to force. While it is justified to ban gamers from GTA Online, a company does not have the right to restrict their access to games irrelevant to it (especially when they have not broken the game’s EULA).
Rockstar Games has not commented yet on this.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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