Yes, the TOS don’t allow commercial mods, which has plusses and minusses. So, yes, technically CD Project Red is in the right. However, it takes a lot of work and time to do some of these mods and if you want to get paid for it that is your right. Just as much as it is your right to not buy it if you don’t like it. Whatever.

There are loads of paid external services that run on top of Amazon, Paypal, Ebay, Discord, most AI products are built on top of OpenAI, etc. It’s a valid (if risky, due to the dependency) way to create value for people.

It seems to me that the TOS are overextended though. How can you legally determine what someone will do with a product they bought? US law is pretty bizarre in that respect, just as companies can get away with not allowing reverse engineering and lock people into buying hugely overpriced repairs and replacement parts only from them. Maybe look at China to see how this kind of law kills innovation and look at monopolies to see how this drives costs up and removes choice for consumers.

[…] Now that the dust has settled, I’m even more sorry to announce that we are leaving behind an adventure that so many of you deeply loved and enjoyed. CD PROJEKT S.A. decided that they would follow in Take-Two Interactive Software’s steps and issued a DMCA notice against me for the removal of the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod.

At least they were a little more open about it, and I could get a reply both from their legal department and from the VP of business development. But in the end it amounted to the same iron-clad corpo logic: every little action that a company takes is in the name of money, but everything that modders do must be absolutely for free.

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). […]

Source: Another one bites the dust | Patreon