Rockstar Games has announced that it has acquired the Cfx.re team behind the GTA 5 FiveM and RDR2 RedM mods. These mods will allow players to play on customized dedicated servers in multiplayer mode. The news was announced on Twitter and Rockstar’s official website a few hours ago.

The acquisition of the Cfx.re team is a surprising turn of events, as Rockstar and Take-Two have been fighting the use of the FiveM mod in GTA Online for years. In 2015, for example, the mod’s creators were banned from the Rockstar Social Club, claiming that FiveM was “an unlicensed alternative multiplayer service that contains code that promotes piracy.” That same year, Take-Two reportedly sent private investigators to the home of one of the banned mod creators in an attempt to convince him to stop developing FiveM altogether.

But interest in GTA RP has not waned, the community has continued to grow, and the money has continued to flow. In November 2022, Take-Two changed GTA Online’s mod policy to be virtually the same as the single-player game’s: Simply put, as long as a mod is non-commercial, doesn’t infringe on intellectual property rights, and doesn’t interfere with official multiplayer or online services, it’s okay to use it.

The FiveM and RedM mods go far beyond the standard GTA Online and Red Dead Online experience. For example, FiveM allows for custom cars, maps, weapons and other content, and dramatically increases the number of players. This has made the FiveM mod an integral part of the GTA Online RP (role-playing game) community: as previously reported, the mod had nearly 270,000 concurrent players in February of this year, almost double the number of people playing unmodded GTA 5 on Steam. GTA RP, as the name suggests, is about taking on different roles in the world of Grand Theft Auto that fall outside of the usual cops-and-robbers gameplay.

The acquisition of the Cfx.re team by Rockstar and Take-Two is a remarkable turnaround, and it will be interesting to see what role they play in future Rockstar games. Fans have already begun to speculate on what this could mean for the future. With it looking increasingly likely that the next Grand Theft Auto will be released next year, fans are already imagining that Cfx.re will create an official RPG server for the game. However, the team has already asked players not to ask them about GTA 6, as they will continue to focus on FiveM and RedM. It’s probably a sign that Rockstar understands the role that community mods play in keeping their games fresh. Released in 2013, GTA 5 is one of the most successful games of all time, with over 185 million units sold to date, and was the most downloaded game on PlayStation Store this July.

Source: Wccftech