GTA V Is Pummeled With Negative Reviews On Steam In Protest To OpenIV Shutdown Decision

As we reported last week, Take-Two sent a cease-and-desist letter to the developers of the OpenIV modding tool for Grand Theft Auto, claiming that the software was guilty of “allow[ing] third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify that software in violation Take-Two’s rights“. As a result, OpenIV is no longer available to the modding community.

Well, gamers have spoken, and they are incredibly ticked off with Take-Two’s decision to wallop the popular OpenIV modding tool into submission. If you head on over to the Grand Theft Auto V page on Steam, gamers have torched the rating for the game, pushing nearly 41,000 reviews during the past 30 days. Only 13 percent of those reviews are listed as “Positive” with the majority of them being “Overwhelmingly Negative”.

In the meantime, a change.org petition has opened to “Save OpenIV”. “The closing of OpenIV leaves 10,000s of people without access to be able to mod their games, and leaves 10,000s of people without the ability to continue their hobbies,” writes t0y is cool, the petition’s originator. “All modding used by OpenIV is for single player use only to make the game more enjoyable, the software OpenIV was never used to mod multiplayer or Grand Theft Auto Online so it does not harm anyone.”

Currently, the petition has amassed over 52,000 supporters and is just 23,000 away from reaching its goal of 75,000 supporters.

For its part, Rockstar Games, the developer of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, issued the following statement:

Take-Two's actions were not specifically targeting single player mods. Unfortunately, OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody. We are working to figure out how we can continue to support the creative community without negatively impacting our players.

We don’t know at this time what Rockstar’s timetable is for addressing the needs of the community, but the company is probably going to need to act sooner rather than later. The community is obviously pissed off about this move and it reflects rather poorly on both Rockstar and Take-Two.