The maker of the popular R.E.A.L. VR mod for Cyberpunk 2077 has accused CD Projekt of “iron-clad corpo logic” after the studio issued a DMCA demanding the mod’s removal.
“Many of you have noticed that two of my recent posts disappeared about a week ago,” mod maker Luke Ross wrote over the weekend on his Patreon. “I apologize that I could not comment personally about the fact, because there was an ongoing legal exchange.
“As usual they stretch the concept of ‘derivative work’ until it’s paper-thin, as though a system that allows visualizing 40+ games in fully immersive 3D VR was somehow built making use of their intellectual property. And as usual they give absolutely zero f***s about how playing their game in VR made people happy, and they cannot just be grateful about the extra copies of the title they sold because of that—without ever having to pour money into producing an official conversion (no, they’re not planning to release their own VR port, in case you were wondering).”
“‘By the corpos’ who created everything and they clearly say that paid mods aren’t allowed,” redditor MotherFunker1734 added. “Mods aren’t a profit machine. Not everything has to be made for profit. No, he doesn’t have to get paid 100,000 times for something he wrote once using someone else’s code.”
Taking the donation route would almost certainly be fine. CD Projekt has historically been supportive of modding, but the first “golden rule” of its fan content guidelines is “no commercial usage,” and describes almost exactly what Ross is doing with the R.E.A.L. VR mod: “We’re happy for you to accept reasonable donations in connection with your fan content, but you’re not allowed to make people pay for it or have it behind any sort of paywall (e.g. don’t make content only available to paid subscribers).”
Even so, Ross admitted to being “bitter” about the takedown, “especially when they never even knew or cared during all this time that the VR conversion was there, and are only knee-jerk reacting now because somebody reported to them that it existed and it was not free.”
Despite that obvious anger, Ross said he wanted to end his message on a positive note, which he did by announcing that R.E.A.L. VR now supports Baldur’s Gate 3. I guess we’ll see how Hasbro feels about this sort of thing soon enough.
