Rockstar's New Modding Rules Dash Influencers' Hopes for Monetized GTA 6 RP Servers

Rockstar Games has laid out its modding policy ahead of Grand Theft Auto 6's launch, and it could shatter the aspirations of some aspiring entrepreneurs.

Rockstar has had a rocky relationship with the modding community, but the developer has eased up in recent years following the massive success of GTA 5's role-playing community. Rockstar even bought the creator of the FiveM modding platform and teamed up with the largest RP server, nopixel, to work on a new version. Now, Rockstar seems to be clarifying its stance on modding before GTA 6 arrives, aiming to reduce potential controversy when modding inevitably kicks off.

The rules are spelled out on Rockstar's website and include clear examples, such as prohibiting the use of others' intellectual property, pornography, bullying, or support for violent extremism. Moreover, modders cannot bring Rockstar's games to platforms they've never been on, and they can't introduce characters, maps, or assets from other games into different titles.

One part of the policy appears to directly target plans that influencers have been cooking up for a while: Rockstar explicitly bans unauthorized commercialization of mods in its games.

For example, influencers like Adin Ross have spent the past couple of years claiming he'd set up a GTA 6 server where players could basically live inside it and earn real money. Ross even said players could quit their real-life jobs and survive on the money made in his GTA 6 server. But unless Rockstar gives the green light, that won't happen. Rockstar's policy states that players cannot exchange real money in mods through crypto or traditional currencies. Players also can't use real money for gambling in modded content, and mod owners can't promote any third-party sponsored content.

In the end, it seems the servers that Ross and other influencers have envisioned won't be possible. As many probably expected, GTA 6 won't be a Second Life experience for making real money. It's still very much a video game, and one that Rockstar intends to keep a close watch over. There's plenty of potential for the game to be corrupted if influencers could radically commercialize their servers, so it's likely for the best that Rockstar is regulating this.

We won't see any mods for GTA 6 for some time, as the game isn't launching on PC on November 19. However, Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, has dropped various hints that GTA 6 will eventually come to PC. How long will that take? We have no idea. It's hard to imagine it being more than a year, given the growing popularity of PC gaming since Rockstar's last major release and the high demand for this game.