The creator of the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod CD Projekt recently hit with a DMCA strike has paused his Patreon page and pulled access to all his mods after receiving another strike from a different publisher.
Luke Ross, creator of the R.E.A.L. VR mods for games such as Elden Ring, Days Gone, and Far Cry, reportedly earns $20,000 a month through Patreon, which acts as a paywall for his work.
He ditched work on his Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod following CD Projekt’s DMCA strike, and has now said he received another strike from publisher 505 Games for his VR conversion of 2020 first-person cyberpunk action game Ghostrunner. IGN has asked 505 Games for comment. Ross declined to comment further when contacted by IGN.
Ross’ Patreon page now carries a warning, telling potential subscribers that “for the moment there will be no benefits available.” That means that even if you subscribe to his Patreon, you won’t get access to any of the more than 40 mods he has locked behind it. Ross said he’ll keep his Patreon locked down “until the legal situation clears out.” Existing subscriptions will have their access extended for one month without further payments, Ross said.
Ross hit the headlines this month when Jan Rosner, VP, Business Development at CD Projekt Red, tweeted to say the company issued its DMCA strike because the Cyberpunk VR was a paid mod, which violates its fan content guidelines.
“We never allow monetization of our IP without our direct permission and/or an agreement in place,” Rosner said. “We were in touch with Luke last week and informed him that he needs to make it free for everyone (with optional donations) or remove it.
“We are big fans of mods to our games — some of the work out there has been nothing short of amazing, including Luke’s mod for Cyberpunk 2077. We’d be happy to see it return as a free release. However, making a profit from our IP, in any form, always requires permission from CD Projekt Red.”
Ross responded to Rosner’s tweet to take issue with his work being characterized as fan content. Rather, Ross insisted, it is independent software and thus does not infringe on CD Projekt’s IP rights.
“I'm sorry but I don't believe you are within your rights in demanding that my software needs to be free,” Ross said. “It is not ‘derivative work’ or ‘fan content’: it supports a large number of games which were built upon different engines, and it contains absolutely zero code or assets from your IP. Saying that it infringes your IP rights is equivalent to maintaining for example that RivaTuner violates game publishers' copyrights because it intercepts the images the game is drawing on screen and it processes them in order to overlay its statistics.”
Earlier this week, Ross told IGN that people were now pirating his Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod to “punish” him for breaking CD Projekt's terms of service.
In a new post to subscribers, Ross said Patreon automatically complied with 505 Games’ alleged DMCA takedown notice for his Ghostrunner mod.
“I don't blame them,” he continued. “DMCA law is 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.”
Ross said his Patreon is now under threat of termination because of repeated DMCA strikes, and must “avoid posting material that will subject your account to further claims of copyright infringement."
“In light of the above facts, I'm being forced to take immediate action,” Ross explained. “I'm making unavailable all versions of the mods and also all the posts related to the wonderful work we have done here together for years, so that there will be no ground for further claims. And since I cannot stop people from subscribing without closing down the account altogether, I'm making it clear on the About and Welcome pages that new subscriptions will have the only effect of supporting me and that no access to the 40+ conversions can or will be provided at this time.”
IGN had asked Ross if he planned to make the Cyberpunk VR mod free, thus complying with CD Projekt’s terms of service. Responding, Ross said that while he wouldn’t rule out doing so, it would be a lot of work.
“I do not rule out releasing the mod free for everyone,” he said. “But it would take time, because my software supports 40+ games and various completely different engines, which makes creating a version that specifically supports only Cyberpunk 2077 a non-trivial task. Also, the people who have voluntarily given their money to me in order to support my development efforts for the framework might not be happy about seeing the mod being given away all of a sudden to everyone just because I've been bullied into it.”
Ross told subscribers that “people on the web are thirsty for blood because back in the GTA 5 and RDR 2 era, an article came out stating that I was raising $20,000 a month.”
He continued: “Is that ‘reasonable’? Assuming that overall the work I poured into making my software support Cyberpunk, turning it into the ‘most immersive gaming experience’ some people had in their lives, amounted to a few months, say $50,000: is that ‘reasonable’ according to the arbitrary criteria of Cyberpunk's publisher? Something tells me it wouldn't be considered reasonable, despite being a tiny fraction of the many millions they would have to invest for porting CP2077 to VR themselves, and despite the fact that the cost was entirely financed by passionate gamers and none of it was incurred by CD Projekt.
“Hopefully we'll find a way together, in the next few weeks. 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.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
