Earlier this year, a mod team called World Travel released Liberty City Preservation Project, an ambitious mod that put the location of Grand Theft Auto IV in the world of Grand Theft Auto V¸ and they gave it away from free. Days later, the mod team announced that they were removing the mod after talking to Rockstar Games. However, what World Travel, and Grand Theft Auto players could not have suspected, was that they were themselves being role played, in real life. At least, allegedly.
Over the past 24 hours, the Grand Theft Auto role playing community has gone into a tizzy over https://fivem.team/. Identifying themselves as community members of Grand Theft Auto Online role playing server FiveM, they made allegations about FiveM and Rockstar games. They claim that they talked to former Rockstar and FiveM employees, and also shared some screenshot evidence.
The webpage was taken down, but you can still read the text and see some pictures on the Wayback Machine snapshot here. We’ve already written about claims that FiveM fell victim to a hostile takeover, and that Rockstar unknowingly hired some developers who leaked Grand Theft Auto V’s source code. Here, we’ll focus on allegations surrounding the Liberty City Preservation Project.
The whistleblowers claim that Rockstar New York employee Ethan Hirsch, who has had an active role in FiveM since they were bought by Rockstar, was in charge of modding policies for Grand Theft Auto. Presumably he was in charge of talking to World Travel, if he didn’t communicate to them directly.
However, they allege that Ethan talked to World Travel in bad faith, because he is just anti-modding. Ironically, the whistleblowers also claim that FiveM, and by extension Ethan, is just allowing players to keep using other Liberty City mods on Grand Theft Auto Online without takedowns or oversight of any kind. Because these are paid mods, they allege that Ethan isn’t touching them because Rockstar is making money from them.
As shared by Rockstar Games dataminer Tez2 on Twitter, World City responded to these rumors on their Discord. From their point of view, they were ‘kindly’ asked to take the Liberty City Preservation Project down. But Rockstar would not respond to their inquiries about making the mod an official part of the game.
They then found out the same paid Liberty City mods on Grand Theft Auto Online that were breaking Rockstar’s own rules, but are mysteriously still online. They reported these rulebreaking mods, and ended their statement with this:
“Currently, these expensive Liberty City mods (some of which sell for prices of around 500 Euroes) are still up. It seems like claims made in the original FiveM developers’ blog are correct. I don’t want to get into speculation, but it wouldn’t be surprising if someone is getting a slice of the pie.
Due to these revelations, we are uncertain if this takedown request is genuine.”
For our part, we can’t verify if any of these claims are true. It’s clear that World City is corroborating what the FiveM whistleblowers are saying, and these combined claims warrant investigation from people above FiveM and Ethan Hirsh at Rockstar Games. Hopefully, Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive can shed light on all these damning allegations themselves.
