Over the week, we have been reporting on fivem.team, a webpage that brought to light a swathe of allegations directed vs. former and current developers in FiveM, as well as people at Rockstar Games. We now have a new update from a YouTuber who has put in some extra legwork to make sense out of the situation.
CYBER BOI reached out to several people who were involved in this situation, including the people who wrote fivem.team, everyone named in the webpage, and members of Grand Theft Auto’s role playing community. He has some stunning news to share, but he also paints a strange picture of events.
Based on CYBER BOI’s video, the situation at FiveM has become so toxic that he isn’t entirely sure who among the people who reached out is to be trusted, or which parts of the fivem.team webpage’s claims are 100 % true. That webpage seems to have been littered with a lot of personal vendettas that it isn’t possible to fully untangle what really happened.
CYBER BOI does share some context that puts Rockstar’s acquisition of FiveM in a new light. For those who don’t know, when NTAuthority originally released FiveM, all the way back to when Grand Theft Auto Online first launched, Rockstar forced her to shut it down.
NTAuthority revived FiveM after seeing the clamor from the community. She set up CFX as something of a dummy corporation, to deflect Rockstar from noticing she was modding their game again.
As we initially reported, one of CFX’s employees arranged for Rockstar’s purchase of FiveM under NTAuthority’s nose. As CYBER BOI explains, NTAuthority wasn’t happy about this, but if she didn’t accept the deal she would simple be sued by Rockstar again.
CYBER BOI also spoke about what he believed was at the heart of the issue – since Rockstar Games gave their tacit approval for role playing servers, even before they bought FiveM, Grand Theft Auto RP players have been looking for more communication from Rockstar. Rockstar did not evenly apply their rules to the different servers and modders in their community, leading not only to grief and a lot of animosity, but a lot of confusion between them.
In fact, CYBER BOI interviewed one such community member, who was misgendering NTAuthority, as clear a sign as any of how toxic the Grand Theft Auto RP community has become. NTAuthority isn’t necessarily liked by everyone in the the Grand Theft Auto RP community. While she set up and did most of the work on FiveM, FiveM players also remember her to have poorly managed the project through the years. Sometimes she would even take FiveM servers down without telling the community.
But it’s clear that NTAuthority is due some degree of respect regardless of her shortcomings to the community. As these Ycombinator and Reddit users point out, she was also pivotal in the Call of Duty servers and modding community, and considered a hero among them.
CYBER BOI also shared some updates that only he could have discovered in the course of researching for this video. Regarding the Liberty City Preservation Project, he found out that the Rockstar employee suspected of sending them a fake takedown request was doxxed. The Liberty City Preservation Project devs denied they were involved, claiming it was done by the person who was running their site. We don’t condone doxxing any individual in these situations.
Subsequently, we reported on claims that Rockstar unwittingly hired people who leaked Grand Theft Auto V’s source code to work at FiveM, ironically giving them full access to that same code. CYBER BOI claims that Rockstar has fired at least one of the people involved, and expects that they will be sued shortly.
So you may not have realized it, but it’s clear now that Rockstar and Take-Two are now taking action in relation to this issue, and are deliberately doing so privately. This may partly be because they’re still busy unpeeling the layers to figure out who to trust and what happened themselves. Of course, revealing anything could also jeopardize any pending legal action. But we should eventually get some confirmation on some of these claims if Rockstar goes ahead with such legal actions, either by their own hands or by legally mandated disclosures.
There’s certainly a lot more to this story, but with much of these details still not made public, we now have to be more cautious in our own reporting as well. So we’ll avoid any speculation prejudiced to any individual in this situation, but we’re certainly keeping an eye out to see if Rockstar and Take-Two finally decide to make this situation public, and what they’ve done to address it.
You can watch CYBER BOI’s video below.
