Rockstar shuts down massive GTA 5 Liberty City mod, to the surprise of no one

Over the last few weeks, you may have seen footage and screenshots circulating of an ambitious Grand Theft Auto 5 mod, which aimed to bring GTA 4‘s metropolis of Liberty City into the game, complete with NPCs to meet and activities to complete.

I hope you didn’t get too excited about it. Rockstar has already shut down the Liberty City Preservation project, making it inaccessible to gamers going forward.

GTA 5 Liberty City Preservation project shut down

Given the scale of what it was promising, the Liberty City Preservation project all seemed too good to be true. Well, that’s because it was, but not through any fault of the developers’ own.

After the project gained momentum with Grand Theft Auto fans, it also attracted the attention of Rockstar itself. Given Rockstar’s reputation with projects like this, it was only ever going one way. In a statement on the project’s Discord server, developer nkjellman shared a message stating, “after speaking with Rockstar Games, we have decided to take down the Liberty City Preservation project.”

With rumors starting to fly, nkjellman also shared a follow-up message, claiming that it wasn’t a DMCA, but “rather a friendly takedown, mutually agreed upon by all parties involved.” While the team may not have faced the full force of Rockstar’s legal team, it certainly sounds like the developer provided a scary enough nudge to make this takedown happen.

Ultimately, the removal of this mod shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Rockstar has been notoriously frivolous with takedowns in the past, even going as far as to DMCA the YouTube channel of Mike Dailly, one of the GTA franchise’s original creators, for showing early prototype footage of the older games. Rockstar isn’t quite Nintendo in this regard, but it certainly has form.

There is the “why?” of it all. It’s rumored that Rockstar was at one point working on a long-canceled Liberty City expansion of its own for GTA 5, but with the sixth game on the horizon, that seems extremely unlikely at this point. Maybe we’ll finally get that Grand Theft Auto 4 remaster we’ve all been waiting for? Probably not, but it’s good to have dreams.