Update: A Rockstar representative confirmed the bans with the following statement provided to Ars: "The FiveM project is an unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy. Our policy on such violations of our terms of service are clear, and the individuals involved in its creation have had their Social Club accounts suspended."

Original Story

A number of modders working on an alternative online playspace for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V say they had their Rockstar Social Club accounts blocked last week, barring them from playing the game or other Rockstar titles associated with the account.

FiveM is an in-development mod allowing Grand Theft Auto V owners to play together on dedicated servers, separate from the centralized, semi-persistent competitive/co-operative space of Grand Theft Auto Online. On Reddit over the weekend, FiveM subreddit moderator qaisjp detailed how he and two developers working on the mod—NTAuthority and TheDeadlyDutch—received ban notices on their Rockstar Social Club accounts in quick succession last week. The Social Club account bans mean they can't even access the single-player mode in their copies of Grand Theft Auto V, and it also blocks the use of any other games previously tied to that account, such as Max Payne 3.

"I believe these bans may be in relation to my existance [sic] on the FiveM project," TheDeadlyDutchi wrote on the Rockstar Support forum over the weekend. "I have not done any reverse engineering or other work on FiveM that may go against the TOS. I hope to resolve this soon."

Shortly after the long-delayed PC release ofin April, many players reported receiving bans for using mods in single-player mode or using innocuous mods to change things like field-of-view in online play. Rockstar was quick to clarify its position , saying it doesn't issue bans for single-player mods but is "regularly rolling out fixes for specific exploits" for online mods that enable cheating.

That statement against cheating wouldn't seem to apply to the FiveM mod, which allows for online play wholly outside the infrastructure for the core GTA Online experience. The Rockstar Games EULA does say players can't "cheat or utilize any unauthorized robot, spider, or other program in connection with any online features of the Software" or "violate any terms, policies, licenses, or code of conduct for any online features of the Software." That wording is vague enough that it could apply to the creation of online workarounds like FiveM, but thus far it seems that merely using the mod has not drawn Rockstar's ire.

Of course, it's possible that these users were banned for some other in-game activity unrelated to their involvement with mod development. Right now, it's not even clear if their accounts were flagged manually by a Rockstar moderator or automatically by in-game algorithms (Rockstar has yet to respond to a request for comment on the matter from Ars Technica). If these players are being targeted for involvement with mod development as they suspect, though, it could have a chilling effect on the entire scene.