Update: Rockstar has issued a statement on single player mods in GTA V.
As we reported yesterday, many players have found themselves getting banned from GTA Online for using mods. This would be understandable, but the mods in question only impacted the single player portion of GTA V, leaving GTA Online untouched. Many wondered why Rockstar would do this, and what justification they had to ban players for using mods, however it seems that the End User License Agreement (EULA) that players agree to explicitly prohibits the use of any mods within the game.
The specific text reads “You agree not to:Â reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, display, perform, prepare derivative works based on, or otherwise modify the Software, in whole or in part”. This part of the EULA has been used as a reason for many of the bans that players have been reporting over the last few days.
Normally this section of an EULA would be standard stuff, with the developer choosing to ignore it in favor of a bustling mod community. However, Rockstar seems to be leveraging it to get players out who simply wanted to change their single player experience. The big question is, how long has this text been present in the EULA. Many online are reporting that this was a recent change, but the notice at the top lists the last revision to the document as October of 2013. Checking the page’s source info yields a change as recent as this morning though, but there is no way to tell what that change was. It could have been simple formatting or some other innocuous alteration.
The fact is that the EULA now explicitly prohibits the use of mods, no matter what mode of GTA V you are in. It is still up to Rockstar to decide if they want to enforce this policy though. They are currently deciding to enforce it fairly heavily, but they could easily change course if enough fans speak out against the bans.
