What happened

• On September 10, Rockstar Games published new mod guidelines on its website, which it says are intended to "maintain a fun, creative, and welcoming place for players and content creators."
• The guidelines are seem primarily targeted at mods for the FiveM and RedM platforms, which Rockstar acquired—along with their developers—in 2023.
• Rockstar says mods must "respect our games": As part of its "right to set limits on how others can use our games and brand," the studio says mods can't expand or modify official storylines, missions, and characters, and can't combine settings and characters from different Rockstar franchises.
• Rockstar says modders can't incorporate other intellectual property or real-world likenesses, and forbids cheat menus or modifications that interfere with its official multiplayer and online services.
• Rockstar calls its official modding platforms "the exclusive licensed home for our community to monetize their mods," forbidding alternative monetization or commercialization of mods for its games.

Do these guidelines have any teeth?

Like Rockstar's more formal terms of service and platform license agreements, these guidelines are the sort of standard rhetorical armament a company equips itself with when in case it needs a quick fix for something egregious: If a mod emerges that could give the studio a legal or financial headache, all it'll need to do is tap the sign before giving the offending user-generated content the boot.

Of course, those guidelines are theoretically more difficult to enforce on platforms the studio doesn't own. For Rockstar, removing a mod that breaks its commandments is easy enough on FiveM. But if that mod's on a third party site—like the one our Josh Wolens used to murder a charmander on the streets of Los Santos—making that problem go away isn't so simple. House rules are a lot harder to enforce at someone else's house.

That hasn't stopped Rockstar in the past, however: In 2021, it sent takedown notices to a number of modding projects that reverse-engineered, restored, or reimplemented elements of older GTA games. It announced and released its trio of GTA Trilogy remasters later that year.

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Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.