GTA Mods: How Take-Two Interactive’s Anti-Mods Campaign Is Corrupting Old Games, As well as Future Releases

Take-Two Interactive and the GTA franchise have been in the headlines lately, apparently for all the wrong reasons. Was it the publisher’s decision to keep the 8 year old game and release it on three different generations of consoles, or parent company Take-Two Interactive launched a seemingly misguided and confusing campaign against GTA game mods.

In particular, Take-Two is targeting mods related to older games in the series, and more specifically, games referred to as the PS2 trilogy. This applies to GTA III, San Andreas and Vice City. Fans immediately took this as a signal that a potential remaster was in the works, a theory helped by Rockstar’s announcement of a “surprise”announcement to mark the 20th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III in October 2021.

The community will love a couple of remasters for sure, but they will also happily keep their favorite mods as they provide a better way to experience these 15 year old games. So while Take-Two Interactive may have a bigger plan, banning a lot of mods across the board is bound to have long-term implications, not just for games of the past, but for those not yet out. Fine.

Take-Two’s campaign against old GTA mods can’t end well for both the community and the company.

Keeping Games Relevant

Simply put, this is perhaps the biggest reason why a significant portion of the GTA game audience has been able to come back and enjoy games from the series’ past. This isn’t to say that the games themselves don’t have qualities to offer on their own, but who wouldn’t want to see enhanced visuals via mods in some of their favorite games of the past?

The GTA modding community has always been on the lookout for inspiration as they have consistently been responsible for some of the most popular mods in the gaming community. From a complete graphical overhaul to something as impressive as GTA’s Portal Gun, it’s all about pushing the limits of what mods are capable of. For many, multiplayer mods for Vice City and San Andreas remain perhaps the source of some of their favorite gaming memories from the last couple of decades. Long before players had RP, the MTA helped players experience multiplayer in Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas. These are not just mods that help improve the experience by adding a bunch of high-res reflections and water-filled roads, these are important tools provided to players,

In turn, the previous catalog of old GTA games from Rockstar Games continues to sell well and remains in the public eye, despite its age. For example, one of the main reasons why Grand Theft Auto V continues to be at the top of sales and on the Twitch charts is due not only to the quality of the game, but also to the fact that Grand Theft Auto Roleplaying Mods, in essence, provides players with a completely new way to experience the game. This changed the narrative of GTA V becoming obsolete, and rest assured Rockstar has taken that into account, which means players can expect some sort of RPG element in a future iteration of Grand Theft Auto Online.

Take-Two is not a fan of old mods, at least it may seem so.

The removal of the modified GTA III mod has raised concerns in the community.

If the community essentially has a hand in keeping games alive, successful, and relevant, then ideally the company shouldn’t have a problem. That was until last year with Take-Two Interactive, as they were perfectly happy to let the community take the reins and help keep these games alive in whatever way they saw fit. But now that the company has plans to release the same games in an updated bundle, have these mods suddenly become awkward?

To be perfectly clear, Take-Two has every right to try to protect their intellectual property and their arguments for banning these mods were pretty dumb to say the least. First, the company explains that they ban mods in cases where “the economy is at risk”or “bad behavior”, which is about as vague and non-binding an answer as one could ask for.

Despite their claims to the contrary, it seems pretty obvious why Take-Two are so relentless in their fight against mods – they’d rather the only way to experience these old games at their best is through the company itself. They’d rather have an updated collection for players to buy than get free mods that in some cases do the job just as well, and in some cases even better.

How this will hurt the GTA franchise in the future

It’s not hard to see that a video game franchise is only successful if the audience is invested in the series and the developer-publisher maintains a healthy relationship with the community. There have been a few instances where the community has included the publisher or vice versa, and this certainly seems like the last time the publisher’s parent community actively opposes their own community.

This will eventually lead to modders abandoning the franchise, effectively taking away one of the most beloved aspects of the series. To put it simply, once the mods are gone, the interest in the older games in the franchise will fade as they will just become obsolete pretty quickly and the modding community won’t lend a helping hand.

For example, the roleplaying modding community is sure to be a bit skeptical about a GTA RP sequel right now, as Take-Two could decide to make an RP game out of the GTA series, thus disabling tons of RP mods in the process. This will definitely make modders wary of GTA and potentially abandon the series in the future, which will definitely be a sad day in gaming history. As a result, the lifespan of a GTA game won’t be what it is today for decades, it will essentially become more of a one-shot series than it is today.