Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has commented on the recent GTA mod takedowns, stating that the company has actually been quite “flexible” when it comes to takedowns.
Recently, various popular GTA mods were taken down due to the creators receiving takedown notices from Take-Two Interactive. For instance, the popular unofficial GTA III and Vice City Switch ports were taken down following a DCMA claim from the company, and this is also the case for some texture and upscaling mods for legacy GTA titles. On the other hand, plenty of other mods haven’t yet been taking down. How does Rockstar’s parent company look at mods for its GTA titles? Well, if Zelnick is to be believed, the company is pretty supple.
“In terms of takedowns, we were pretty flexible, frankly, that said, if the economy is threatened, or if there's bad behavior and we know how to define that, then we would issue a takedown notice”, the CEO said during the company’s latest earnings call with investors when asked about the reasoning behind the recent takedowns.
A rather ‘interesting’ answer since there are still a lot of mods out there, even for GTA V, that might be more eligible for a takedown.
As covered yesterday, GTA V has now surpassed 150 million units sold since the game’s first launch back in 2013. Rockstar will re-release the latest GTA installment on the next-gen consoles later this year.
“And certainly ongoing demand for Grand Theft Auto 5 has been huge”, Zelnick told investors. “We sold in over 150 million units. So I'm not sure we've seen -- I'm not sure we could measure it in any case, I don't know. We'd have to do valor research and it still wouldn't tell us anything that we could do differently. But I remain of the view that the Enhanced Edition of Grand Theft Auto 5 will be highly appealing to consumers with next gen platforms, or now current gen platforms. But that remains to be seen.”
