Grand Theft Auto roleplay servers are a relatively small niche in Grand Theft Auto Online. However, because of Grand Theft Auto Online’s scale, that’s still a significantly sized player base that most game publishers would love to have.
Last year, we reported on Rockstar acquiring FiveM. Ostensibly, this should have led to Grand Theft Auto roleplay officially becoming a part of Grand Theft Auto Online. Even then, there were rumors that there had been internal turmoil in FiveM after this deal, but it wasn’t possible to verify them at the time. Today, new rumors emerged painting an ugly picture in FiveM and Rockstar.
The rumors come from a webpage with the url https://fivem.team/. That URL is no longer live, but thankfully the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine managed to get a snapshot as recently as the day before we are making this report now. You can read it here.
We will provide our own summary of events, but we also want to credit Tez2, a well-known Rockstar dataminer, for sharing his own summary of these new claims, and helping spread the word about them. You can read his summary on Bluesky here.
FiveM today is poorly managed, with the original developers gone and replaced by people who don’t know what they’re doing. FiveM’s code hasn’t been updated or fixed since they were purchased by Rockstar, and the current FiveM team apparently wants to replace it.
As it turns out, this happened because of a hostile takeover. The original FiveM team, led by NTAuthority, and hereby referred to as the CFX team, were replaced by Groot Gang and alt:V, two other developer teams who are the people running FiveM today.
Ironically, NTAuthority originally agrees to hire Groot and the other developers who would join Groot Gang into FiveM. It’s alleged that Groot Gang don’t do much work on FiveM, but it does well because of the CFX devs anyway.
The key allegation here is that Groot Gang conspired to sell FiveM to Rockstar even though NTAuthority is the owner. They manage to win over NTAuthority so that the deal goes through.
And then, Groot Gang asks for 30 % of the Rockstar FiveM deal from NTAuthority. She turns them down, so after the deal is finalized, Groot Gang lies to Rockstar to get NTAuthority fired.
Groot Gang apparently also has the ear of a Rockstar employee, one Ethan Hirsch from Rockstar New York. They convince Ethan to replace the original CFX devs, and Ethan goes on to pick up developers from alt:V, which is another roleplay mod project like FiveM.
As of today, Groot Gang and alt:V have taken over the project completely, and these allegations are being made by FiveM community members who reached out to people in Rockstar and CFX.
We will tell you now that our summary barely scratches the surface of the full story, but these are the essential allegations regarding FiveM. As of this writing, we haven’t seen any responses from FiveM or Rockstar Games yet, but given how damaging these allegations are, we expect to see them shortly.
