It’s not a great headline to hear that a big corporation shut down a fan mod in their game, as unless it’s something wholly X-rated or wildly against terms of service, it’s never a good look. So hearing CDPR is nuking a big Cyberpunk 2077 mod doesn’t sound great.
But it’s justified. Totally. And it’s a weird situation.
Modder LukeRoss has made an elaborate Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod that lets the game run in virtual reality, something it has not been officially supported for. The problem is not the kind of mod it is, but that Ross was charging $10 for it, despite obviously not owning the underlying IP.
CDPR did not even instantly shut it down; they gave Ross the chance to make it free and just ask for donations, due to the fact that it violated their policies. Here’s what CDPR VP Jan Rosner said about it:
“I’d like to briefly address the discussion around the “Cyberpunk VR” mod created by Luke Ross. We have indeed issued a DMCA strike, as it was available as a paid mod (only accessible to Patreon subscribers). This directly violates our Fan Content Guidelines: we never allow monetization of our IP without our direct permission and/or an agreement in place. We were in touch with Luke last week and informed him that he needs to make it free for everyone (with optional donations) or remove it.”
“We are big fans of mods to our games — some of the work out there has been nothing short of amazing, including Luke’s mod for Cyberpunk 2077. We’d be happy to see it return as a free release. However, making a profit from our IP, in any form, always requires permission from @CDPROJEKTRED.”
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That seems more than fair, but Ross responded to that tweet straight up saying he thinks they’re misrepresenting their own policies. Here’s Ross:
“Thank you Jan. I’m sorry but I don’t believe you are within your rights in demanding that my software needs to be free. It is not “derivative work” or “fan content”: it supports a large number of games which were built upon different engines, and it contains absolutely zero code or assets from your IP. Saying that it infringes your IP rights is equivalent to maintaining for example that RivaTuner violates game publishers’ copyrights because it intercepts the images the game is drawing on screen and it processes them in order to overlay its statistics.”
The story has spread on social media and has drawn little support for Ross’ position here, with most thinking that CDPR is well within its rights to take it down. There’s no indication that Ross will change his mind and make the mod free, but perhaps after some reflection, he might. He’s already a hugely popular modder making a lot of money from his other work, so it’s not exactly his whole livelihood. We’ll see what happens next.
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