Take-Two Kills "Essential" Grand Theft Auto V Mod

[Gaarst]

@Kerbart KSP has no DRM at all, so I guess that does it for DRM limitations.

Edited June 17, 2017 by Gaarst

[Kerbart]

Just now, Gaarst said:

@Kerbart KSP has no DRM.

It's not inconceivable you missed the undertone of my post. Yes, that is exactly my point. The C&D had to do with limitations in GTA that the involved mod (unintended, but still) allowed to bypass. Whether such limitations are Evil Capitalism is besides the point; KSP has no such limitations and there's no reason to assume T2 would kill them. Microsoft didn't kill mods on Minecraft when they bought it; it would kill the game. T2 is not going to kill their acquisition either. There are many ways they can monetize the Kerbals; why jeopardize their flagship game?

[Gaarst]

6 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

It's not inconceivable you missed the undertone of my post. Yes, that is exactly my point. The C&D had to do with limitations in GTA that the involved mod (unintended, but still) allowed to bypass. Whether such limitations are Evil Capitalism is besides the point; KSP has no such limitations and there's no reason to assume T2 would kill them. Microsoft didn't kill mods on Minecraft when they bought it; it would kill the game. T2 is not going to kill their acquisition either. There are many ways they can monetize the Kerbals; why jeopardize their flagship game?

I did not miss your point (and I pretty much agree), I am just not able to make proper sentences to express myself. :|

Edited my previous post for clarity.

Edited June 17, 2017 by Gaarst

[TheEpicSquared]

IMO, Take Two won't remove mods in KSP, because EVERYONE would completely explode. Then again, the did it with GTA V, so who knows...

But if they do decide to go on the same route with KSP, I think the most vulnerable addon would be ModuleManager. Think about it. Prettt much every mod uses MM. Need to do anything? Write a ModuleModule patch! I have yet to see a mod that doesn't include MM as a dependency.

If ModuleManager gets shut down...

[Starman4308]

13 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

IMO, Take Two won't remove mods in KSP, because EVERYONE would completely explode.

I honestly rather doubt the majority of KSP players use mods. Many people in the forums, yes, but I'm pretty sure most KSP players aren't hardcore, forum-going mod-users, and wouldn't even know that happened.

16 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

But if they do decide to go on the same route with KSP, I think the most vulnerable addon would be ModuleManager. Think about it. Prettt much every mod uses MM. Need to do anything? Write a ModuleModule patch! I have yet to see a mod that doesn't include MM as a dependency.

Extremely improbable. With OpenIV, they had both legal justification (breaking into protected content) and a business motive (encouraging people to go online and purchase microtransaction content).

With Module Manager, it does not, to my knowledge, conflict with KSP's TOU/EULA, nor does it conflict with the KSP business model. There is no DRM or microtransaction content, and somehow I doubt Sarbian would put much effort into cracking any DRM machinery Take Two adds.

[TheRagingIrishman]

4 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

I honestly rather doubt the majority of KSP players use mods. Many people in the forums, yes, but I'm pretty sure most KSP players aren't hardcore, forum-going mod-users, and wouldn't even know that happened.

Ya I looked it up one time. The most popular mods have around 1.5 million total downloads (but most of those will be repeats) while KSP has over 2 million copies sold.

[Kerbart]

6 minutes ago, TheRagingIrishman said:

Ya I looked it up one time. The most popular mods have around 1.5 million total downloads (but most of those will be repeats) while KSP has over 2 million copies sold.

It's very hard to interpret those numbers though. Aside from certainty on how many copies KSP has sold (other sources than Steam, etc):

• While mod downloads do not represent unique installs, there are also multiple places where mods can be downloaded. Depending on how that 1.5M was measured, the actual number  of downloads might be even higher than that.
• The 2 million copies sold do not represent active players. I think that there's a good chunk that bought it at a Steam sale, played it twice and went “meh” (I know. Heretics!)
• It's not far fetched to assume that the same audience that installs mods is the audience where you can find the DLC buyers. That is not to say that all mod-installers will buy the DLC, but the likelyhood that a DLC customer has mods installed will be much, much higher than that they're playing 100% stock.

Even when the mod downloads, after taking multiple version downloads etc, represent “only” 10% of total sales, it would easily translate to 50% or more of the active players that T2 will try to sell DLC to, I think. But I will admit that I pulled those numbers out of the Mohole (where the sun don't shine).

[cratercracker]

There is no more mods in KSP...

que some post apocalyptic music

Aside from jokes, I am mostly relying on visual mods, part mods for me is a bit of more lags and bugs to the game.

BUT what about all the people playing in RSS and can't live without it? 

Currently deleting mods from KSP is deleting KSP itself!

I know what you are thinking "But hey! A lot of people play stock!"

I'll answer using a bit complicated variant,

There is 3 types of KSP gamers.

1. Those are fully stock gamers, with like absolute 0 mods installed. Those are mostly kids who don't even know what mod is, or some hardcore guys who think playing stock is better (at some point they are right)

There is no much of them, yet there is some.

2. Players who like visual,essential and etc. mods. Like mechjeb or SVE or EVE or scatterer or any scripting mod! The worst part of it, is that people can't really play without them.

No, seriously. Can a man (or a woman) who played 7 months or more with Kos, like and understand his game without it?

I presume- No.

3. People who like playing with different parts, or create them. Those will not end up so badly, but the problem is the addition, it is like alcohol or smoking- once to started, you will want more and more, until you get bored, or your game will lag and bug out all the time.

 

Just think of it. I am probably wrong.

[regex]

9 hours ago, Melfice said:

This was content that was made available for free! It just was, for entirely devious reasons, locked away from single player because doing so allowed RockStar and Take Two to rake in a bit more money from the microtransactions.

It's important to remember that the restrictions on the content were circumvented, which constitutes a breach of license. It doesn't matter whether the content was free (in terms of purchase), Take Two/Rockstar are not only in the legal right here but also in the ethical right, as they set out terms of use on purchase which were later circumvented.

On another point, it doesn't matter how this affects the community if it sets a precedent of allowing license circumvention.

Quote

Yes, I'm entirely aware how weird that reads. But that hopefully also illustrates how entirely horrible microtransactions are.

That's aside from the conversation and has nothing to do with this move in terms of Squad, a company which does not use microtransactions.

[GluttonyReaper]

2 hours ago, cratercracker said:

1. Those are fully stock gamers, with like absolute 0 mods installed. Those are mostly kids who don't even know what mod is, or some hardcore guys who think playing stock is better (at some point they are right)

There is no much of them, yet there is some.

I haven't really got a horse in this race, so to speak... but I feel you might be underestimating the number of people who fall into this catergory. There's also a lot of people who simply just don't care about mods - not because they're young or anything, but just because it's not something they do. We take it for granted on the forums how easy it is to install mods for KSP... I'd tried with other games in the past, and it'd always taken a lot of time and energy and fiddling to get everything working, usually with sub-par results that occasionally broke for reasons I wasn't smart enough to understand. Hence why it tends to be a niche, minority thing for most games. Until you try modding KSP, you'd have no reason to think it was any different, so I think a lot of people just never get to that point.

There's also many people who just don't have the time to mess with mods, the kind of people who boot up KSP once a fortnight when they have a few hours free. When you haven't got much time to play the game, it often doesn't matter how easy mods are to install, the benefits are largely outweighed by the time spent installing and keeping said mods up to date. Some people would rather just have more time to play the game.

This forum more than likely isn't representative of KSP users as a whole, with most 'casual' players never making it to the forums. It seems more likely that the majority of players are running pure stock at least.

...and of course, there's console players, but that's a whole other issue entirely

[RA3236]

I've personally had to deal with the kill on GTA modding, and while my fellow Nodo crewmembers aren't very happy about the modding situation in Online, killing a mod like Open IV is plain idiotic.

I'm not completely sure what this change in tactics brings for KSP (especially since apparently under T2's EULA modding their games is illegal), but for now I think modding KSP is safe from these changes. I will not bring in how modding brings in money for many games, or how this tactic has changed reviews on many of T2's games, as this may cause unnecessary discussion in this and other threads.

[richfiles]

19 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

The amount of effort spent on cracking secure code does not have anything to do with how legal the cracking was. As to sending C&Ds out... you have the issue that there are a lot of those mods and modders, and I don't blame Take Two for going after the root of the problem, a mod that makes cracking monetized content much easier.

That's the thing... the "cracking" WAS DONE LEGALLY... That's the whole point of clean reverse engineering. A license and law are not one and the same. It's not illegal to reverse engineer something. It might be against the license to do so. That's where a clean reverse engineering effort comes into the picture. One team reverse engineers the game. Sure that violates the license, but no code is created. Since they created no code, there's no software in violation of the license. All they do is document the overall operations of the code... Not actual code, just what the code does. The second team takes that documentation and then writes NEW and ORIGINAL code, having never, ever actually seen the original GTA code before. By following the behavior documentation, they create an original LEGAL work that just so happens to be (mostly) compatible with the targeted software, and they have never looked at the target software's code. This is how reverse engineering works.

Reverse engineering is legal!

Even the team that created OpenIV said it themselves... They could have taken this to court to prove their case against Take-Two, and probably could have even won the case under fair use... They documented their reverse engineering process, and could prove in a court that their software was legit reverse engineered, and is not a derivative of licensed code, thus immune from Take_Two's C&D. They could have done that... IF they had the time and money to do it, and were willing to deal with the abysmal stress of it. Unfortunately, it's not worth the hell that the would go through by going to court against a giant company for them to fight it. 

They didn't give up cause they were wrong.

They didn't give up because their software is illegal (it is NOT illegal)

They gave up, cause fighting is hard, expensive, time consuming, and stressful.

Take-Two are a bunch of two-faced liars when they claim OpenIV is illegal. They. Are. Lying. To. You! Their EULA is not law, and reverse engineering is legal.

Don't be sheeple, people!

As to the claim that going after the modding tool "makes sense"... Look at GTA V's rating on Steam right now... Take-Two vilified themselves. They WILL lose customers over this. People will stop buying Shark Cards over this... They won't lose everyone, no... But they lost a great deal of respect, and exchanged it with utter hatred and contempt. There are safe harbor laws... You don't go after an ISP for hosting a piracy website... You take down the website. Going after OpenIV is like going after the ISP cause there's a piracy site on it. What Take-Two did was morally bankrupt. It will hurt them in the long run, if they fail to fix this. OpenIV was never the problem. Taking down OpenIV didn't stop the online MP hacking (cause it has nothing to do with the online MP hacking), and they killed their own SP community because they are greedy $#!+$ that WANT Single Player to die down, and force people onto the more financially lucrative Multiplayer online mode, to be microtransactioned to death.

You don't go after the ISP cause there's a piracy website hosted by it. You go after the site, not the ISP.

You don't go after the modding tool, when a handful of mods enables monetized content. You go after the mods, not the tool.

As long as Rockstar uses Take-Two as a publisher, Rockstar will never see another purchase from me again. I won't be paying jack$#!+ for any KSP DLC either. I REFUSE to support Take-Two in any way. They can burn for all I care.

Edited June 18, 2017 by richfiles

[Jabbman]

FAKE NEWS!

[RA3236]

1 hour ago, richfiles said:

Take-Two are a bunch of two-faced liars when they claim OpenIV is illegal. They. Are. Lying. To. You! Their EULA is not law, and reverse engineering is legal.

Under Australian and many other countries, including the US, law, if one accepts a legally binding contract, e.g. An EULA, it can be illegal to break this contract. Half of the GTA crew I'm currently part of have been talking about this and we all agree that what Take Two has done is perfectly legal and Open IV is basically illegal under the EULA. Of course, I doubt any of us are lawyers, so if you happen to be one please PM me and I'll remove this post.

EDIT: I reread your post. I'm going to go and confirm this before anything.

Edited June 18, 2017 by RA3236

[GluttonyReaper]

Update: Menyoo and Lexicon (which are mod menus for GTA V) have recieved similar emails to the Open IV team, and have now also shut down.

...unlike Open IV though, these two were explicitly made to run in GTA Online in addition to singeplayer, in the form of extra 'paid' versions, if I'm reading this correctly. Both have said that they be donating the money made to a charity chosen by Take-Two, in statements that seem eerily similar (actually, exactly the same now that I look at it. Guess it's standard issue?).

[RA3236]

48 minutes ago, GluttonyReaper said:

Update: Menyoo and Lexicon (which are mod menus for GTA V) have recieved similar emails to the Open IV team, and have now also shut down.

...unlike Open IV though, these two were explicitly made to run in GTA Online in addition to singeplayer, in the form of extra 'paid' versions, if I'm reading this correctly. Both have said that they be donating the money made to a charity chosen by Take-Two, in statements that seem eerily similar (actually, exactly the same now that I look at it. Guess it's standard issue?).

Standard issue. A major one went down a few days ago, and there's a couple minor ones shutting down in fear.

[Kerbart]

3 hours ago, richfiles said:

That's the thing... the "cracking" WAS DONE LEGALLY... That's the whole point of clean reverse engineering. A license and law are not one and the same. It's not illegal to reverse engineer something. It might be against the license to do so. That's where a clean reverse engineering effort comes into the picture. One team reverse engineers the game. (...) This is how reverse engineering works.

Reverse engineering is legal!

Even the team that created OpenIV said it themselves... They could have taken this to court to prove their case against Take-Two, and probably could have even won the case under fair use... They documented their reverse engineering process, and could prove in a court that their software was legit reverse engineered, and is not a derivative of licensed code, thus immune from Take_Two's C&D. They could have done that... IF they had the time and money to do it, and were willing to deal with the abysmal stress of it. Unfortunately, it's not worth the hell that the would go through by going to court against a giant company for them to fight it. 

There's a few issues with these claims.

1. Yes, “Clean room design” is a thing. It's used to copy a design without infringing on copyrights. The word here is copy. If you're programming against an interface there's nothing to copy, so using a clean room design to develop a GTA V mod doesn't make any sense.
2. I'm sure Open IV would have won a case against copyright infringement in court. They didn't copy anything. So why did they not deal with that? Ooh, wait, this is not about copyrights.
3. Clean room design approaches are usually lawyer-loaded events with notaries documenting it, and painful care taken to prove that the two design teams have not had any contact with each other (to the point of putting them in different buildings, and so on). The whole point of clean room design is to successfully fight a court case of copyright infringement.  So the claim that OpenIV went through all the trouble of building their software in a Clean room design approach and then decide that they lack the money to fight the case... It's like building your own aircraft and then deciding to not fly it because you don't have a pilot's license.
4. The case wasn't about reverse engineering. The case was about breaking the license outlined in the EULA, a legally binding contract. It's the same reason Squad is handing out the DLC for free to those early buyers, as they're bound to a EULA that worded it ambiguously (yes, they might win each individual court case. But court cases are expensive). What happens when you break the EULA? In most cases, actually, nothing; it's not worth it for the license holder to take you to court.. What happens when you break the EULA in such a way that it's causing significant financial damage to the owner of the EULA? They'll take you to court. It's not rocket science. And even if it were, given that this is the KSP forum, we can safely discuss it.
5. There's legislation against legal muzzling. A big company trying to shut a small legal operation down in court? Your lawyer will happily play ball, knowing that she can succesfully sue the big company for damages and have them pay for her. All that's stopping her from doing so is if your case is likely to lose. So there's how "legal" OpenIV's operation was.

Coming up with the claim that these mods were legal... there's a lot of claims out there of people who claim certain things are legal. Claiming legality doesn't make things legal; a court order does. These mods were all breaking the EULA. 

[Starman4308]

4 hours ago, richfiles said:

Don't be sheeple, people!

I could turn that around on you.

Don't blindly accept the claims of the OpenIV team either. As mentioned by Kerbart, the issue isn't solely that the GTA code was copied using a legal dodge that is very difficult to prove, it's that the mod itself violated EULA by permitting access to locked content.

Don't be one of those people whose kneejerk reaction is to think "the big evil company is at fault, of course they're going after the little guy!" That is a one-way ticket to being "sheeple", just for a different set of greedy liars.

In general, my primary disagreement is this: who gave you or the OpenIV team the right to decide what could and couldn't happen with the GTA software? Who said Take Two had to take the time to go after every little EULA violator instead of going after the EULA-breaking tool that enabled such? Who said they had to permit mods at all in their software?

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, RA3236 said:

Under Australian and many other countries, including the US, law, if one accepts a legally binding contract, e.g. An EULA, it can be illegal to break this contract. Half of the GTA crew I'm currently part of have been talking about this and we all agree that what Take Two has done is perfectly legal and Open IV is basically illegal under the EULA. Of course, I doubt any of us are lawyers, so if you happen to be one please PM me and I'll remove this post.

EDIT: I reread your post. I'm going to go and confirm this before anything.

In EU an EULA is not legal binding. Yes you can get banned for breaking EULA, but that is internal rules, just the same way as the soccer rules are internal. 
you will get expelled from the field breaking them but they have nothing to do with law just internal rules. 

If the EULA is legally binding they could take you to court for using exploits in an online game  No nobody will do it, it make no sense and might well stop making EULA legal binding. 

 

[Neroziat]

what people dont seem to be understanding here is the reason take two took an interest in ksp is because they think they can make more money, everyone into the current version of ksp and this whole community chatting and modding has already bought the game. we dont magically get a refund if they turn evil, so all we can do is complain on steam, and if take two manages to turn us into a minority of the player base then we are screwed.

take two has proven their selves to be evil. what does squad gain from working with them? the game is already built. unless they plan to rebuild a new ksp 2.0 with microtransactions.

and you think if take two offered some paychecks to existing mod developers that they wouldnt get any support? bs, most would sell out in a heartbeat, money is money. the ones who don't sell out they would clone their stuff and dismiss.

and im willing to bet if we gripe about it too much we will find ourselves without a place to gripe or say anything other than steam reviews. this very important thread is "hidden" in the lounge. (it was under "ksp discussion", and we are discussing ksp)

[Starman4308]

56 minutes ago, Neroziat said:

take two has proven their selves to be evil.

So, so very evil for enforcing that mods don't use a library that helps crack into protected content. It's not like they're the IP owners or anything; who are they to say how GTA V can or can't be used?

1 hour ago, Neroziat said:

what does squad gain from working with them?

A large, experienced group of fellow developers to help polish up the game and produce DLC?

1 hour ago, Neroziat said:

and you think if take two offered some paychecks to existing mod developers that they wouldnt get any support? bs, most would sell out in a heartbeat, money is money. the ones who don't sell out they would clone their stuff and dismiss.

I think you underestimate how much work it is to take a mod and turn it into commercial-quality code. It's not nearly so simple as "fork Github repo, profit".

1 hour ago, Neroziat said:

and im willing to bet if we gripe about it too much we will find ourselves without a place to gripe or say anything other than steam reviews. this very important thread is "hidden" in the lounge. (it was under "ksp discussion", and we are discussing ksp)

This not-terribly-important thread is exactly where it should be: in the forum for things not KSP related, such as GTA V modding.

[TheRagingIrishman]

1 hour ago, Neroziat said:

 so all we can do is complain on steam

and im willing to bet if we gripe about it too much we will find ourselves without a place to gripe or say anything other than steam reviews

Please don't leave tons of bad reviews on Steam just because T2 owns KSP (if they do bad stuff to KSP then feel free). Logic:

1. People leave tons of bad reviews even though T2 hasn't done anything yet
2. No one new buys KSP because of all the bad reviews driving down ratings
3. T2 needs some way to get money so they are forced to extract it from the current users

1 hour ago, Neroziat said:

this very important thread is "hidden" in the lounge. (it was under "ksp discussion", and we are discussing ksp)

This thread is about T2 and GTA. If you want to talk about T2 and KSP, there's a thread for it (under Announcements)

Edited June 18, 2017 by TheRagingIrishman

[HebaruSan]

11 minutes ago, TheRagingIrishman said:

Please don't leave tons of bad reviews on Steam just because T2 owns KSP (if they do bad stuff then feel free).

Personally I think such reviews violate the spirit if not the letter of Steam's terms of service, since they have nothing to do with the experience of playing the actual game. You're not helping someone understand whether KSP is a good game by downvoting it because of something that happened to GTAV.

[AverageJoeGuy]

Doesn't matter what people do with the reviews. T2 is going to get their money, just like they will with Kerbal.

[AverageJoeGuy]

1 hour ago, TheRagingIrishman said:

This thread is about T2 and GTA. If you want to talk about T2 and KSP, there's a thread for it (under Announcements)

We tried, they moved it here.