There are some interesting rumors about Rockstar Games’ most unlikely acquisition of last year.
We imagine only the most committed Grand Theft Auto Online players will remember this one. As we reported last year, Rockstar actually acquired CFX.re. FiveM and RedM were creator and role playing communities for Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Redemption, respectively.
In plain English, Rockstar picked up the platforms were players were running mods for their games, and mods that were particularly geared towards role playing as the NPCs in the games themselves. This piece of news seemed so unlikely that we wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe it.
Rockstar had been taking legal action against mods for the better half of this decade, but the acquisition seemed to be an indication that they understood that their own players were interested in these new experiences in Grand Theft Auto Online that Rockstar itself was not offering.
As reported by Rockstar Intel, Rockstar Games is preparing to launch FiveM onto consoles. Or rather, they are launching their own version of FiveM, made by Rockstar themselves.
If Rockstar Intel’s sources are accurate, there had been issues with onboarding CFX employees into Rockstar Games. FiveM and CFX’s founder, who used the handle NTA, was allegedly not part of the deal. Rockstar and CFX settled on the deal for $ 20 million, but NTA didn’t know about it until the last minute.
Half a year into this acquisition, NTA had apparently been kicked out of CFX, and subsequently, Rockstar Games. The claim is actually that she was kicked out twice, though the reasons were not confirmed. At least, she had allegedly violate the terms of her Rockstar contract, and had complaints against them.
A leaked Take-Two communication stated that FiveM’s actions “impacted millions of players and damaged Rockstar’s credibility, as they had promised that the acquisition would improve service.” For their part, a former FiveM developer said that Rockstar Games was “an extremely toxic environment where we had to suffer from major mismanagement”.
But moving forward, Rockstar really does own FiveM, and they also own the content on it. The rumor goes that FiveM will be officially launched as Rockstar’s property on PC first, but a console release is also coming. The speculation is that FiveM has been building a conversion tool, which would make sense if FiveM was being produced for consoles. Ultimately, Rockstar is hoping to monetize FiveM in some way.
We also need to point out that a lot of the details in these rumors are disputed. NTA has directly denied these rumors, while a community moderator on CFX.re claims that the public should not believe anything about these claims of FiveM coming to consoles.
On the side, role playing and community modding seem to be perfectly enjoyable ways to play Grand Theft Auto Online, and it stands to reason that Rockstar would want to utilize it. If Rockstar runs their own mod platform, they may be able to discourage players from using their own mods, at least without Rockstar’s controls.
More importantly, they may explore ideas such as allowing community members to sell content on their implementation of FiveM on PC and consoles. There’s a lot of potential win for Grand Theft Auto players on this news, but we will have to wait and see how Rockstar actually goes about utilizing that.
