High-profile modder Luke Ross has seen their Patreon paused following a second DMCA takedown this month. Following the high-profile DMCA takedown of the modder’s Cyberpunk 2077 conversion to VR, a new DMCA has resulted in the temporary pausing of the modder’s pay-walled Patreon.
Last week, Ross’ high-profile Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod was taken down by CD Projekt Red following a warning from the Polish game studio to make the mod free for all users. Now, the modder has been hit with a second DMCA takedown by 505 Games for a VR conversion of Ghostrunner.
As a result, Ross’ told fans that they are “forced to temporarily pause the Patreon page” with fans having “no access to the 40+ mods or detailed information about my VR conversions until the legal situation clears out”.
In an email reportedly sent out to subscribers, Ross claimed that “making the mod freely available is by no means the clear-cut solution that people on the internet would make it to be, because DMCA superpowers given to big companies and payments/donations needed for complex projects like this one are two completely unrelated matters.”
Ross’ email to subscribers took aim at CD Projekt Red’s statement that the mod would be allowed to exist as free software with optional donations. The modder also blamed DMCA laws which they claimed are “carefully worded to give infinite power to big companies, who only need to write on a slip of paper that they ‘believe’ their copyright has been infringed in order to nuke from the sky anything they don’t like—and to give infinite headaches to creators like me, who instead have the only recourse of going to court, sustaining huge costs to get through the legal process”.
The VR modder claimed that CD Projekt Red’s statement that modders can accept “reasonable” donations for their works does not apply to projects like Ross’, arguing that a full VR conversion would take “many millions” for the studio.
“Hopefully we’ll find a way together, in the next few weeks,” the modder said to fans. “But if we can’t, we’ll always have the memories of the wonderful times we spent in those beautiful virtual worlds. Oh and by the way: if you have existing copies of the mods that you downloaded here before all this drama, you will of course be able to use them indefinitely and without restrictions, just like people have been doing for years with the RDR2 mod, as long as the games do not get breaking updates from the publishers.”
Following the takedown of Ross’ Cyberpunk 2077 mod, they immediately released a mod for Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3. This is despite Larian’s modding rules specifically stating that modders “shall not sell, rent, lease, license, distribute or exploit the Baldur’s Gate 3 toolkit and/or mods or any copies thereof, for money or other benefits” without express permission.
It is a more complicated process than most mods, however, as Ross’ “mods” are technically a custom-built software sweet that plugs into multiple games. For example, the Cyberpunk 2077 mod isn’t necessarily a mod for Cyberpunk, but technically custom settings for the modder’s Real VR software.
In a recent interview with IGN, Ross explained that making the Cyberpunk 2077 mod free specifically would be a challenge as the “software supports 40+ games and various completely different engines, which makes creating a version that specifically supports only Cyberpunk 2077 a non-trivial task”.
Additionally, over the last week, Ross revealed that many gamers were now pirating the Real VR software he created as well as hurling abuse towards the modder. The modder said that gamers were harassing them “brazenly saying that since I was not complying with CDPR’s ToS, my work is now fair game and I should be punished by having it stolen”.
