Over the weekend, various GTA fan mods were hit with takedowns from Take-Two Interactive, the company which owns GTA developer Rockstar Games. Some of these mods have existed for a long time without any sort of issue.

   GTA: Liberty City was a total conversion that brought the setting of GTA 3 into Vice City's engine, and was first released in 2005. It is no longer available on ModDB. Vice Cry, which replaced Vice City's textures and models with higher-resolution versions, is also gone. So are the mods converting San Andreas into ports of console-exclusives Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories.

   Rockstar's website contains an agreement concerning PC GTA mods, which was drafted in 2017. Basically, it says that mods are fine so long as they are single-player and non-commercial. Initially made during the back-and-forth over modding tool OpenIV in 2017, and which many modders have been assuming would protect their work, was quietly updated in 2019. 

   It added a disclaimer that Take-Two can basically ignore the rules it set up at any point, 'Take-Two reserves the right to object to any third party project, or to revise, revoke and/or withdraw this statement at any time in their own discretion.'

   It now says that modders can't make new games, maps, stories, or missions, which doesn't really give modders any sort of leeway. It sounds like Take-Two doesn't allow for modding at all. The original agreement without these new additions has even been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

   As for why Take-Two has decided to go after these mods now - one of which, it's worth saying again, is 16 years old - the internet is currently split between two theories. One, that it's because they're seen as competition for hypothetical remastered versions of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. And two, that it's connected to recent rumors about GTA 6.

   There is some belief that these takedowns are the result of remasters or remakes of previous GTA games being in development.

   Even if this is the case, it's unlikely to placate the modding community. Not every mod has been affected yet, but there appears to be almost nothing stopping Take-Two from making GTA mods an impossibility.