A Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod got taken down and people are not happy about it. Well, except for the game’s publisher and developer, CD Projekt Red, who came out publicly to say that it’s “glad” this happened.
The mod comes from the skillful hands of well known developer Luke Ross. Much like most of his previous body of work, this time the whole thing involves adding VR support for Cyberpunk 2077.
The thing is: the mod is locked behind a paywall. That — and not the fact that the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod exists — was the problem in the first place.
According to a plethora of people who reported on this, CD Projekt Red is even welcoming of the mod…if it returns for free. Ross, on the other hand, says that the company has no right on deciding whether his mod — or, paraphrasing, “his work” — should be priced or not.
Ross himself put out a statement via Patreon:
“Am I a little bitter about all of this? Yeah, you bet I am. Especially in the same week when Meta pulls the plug on three major VR studios. Especially after four years during which I (together with other modders) spent so much time keeping our mods alive in spite of CDPR’s constant breaking updates. Especially when they never even knew or cared during all this time that the VR conversion was there, and are only knee-jerk reacting now because somebody reported to them that it existed and it was not free.”
Does CD Projekt Red have the right on Cyberpunk 2077 VR Mod? Here’s the legalese
Gaming mods are a bit of a legal conundrum. On one hand, they are completely dependent on the game’s original code to merely exist, let alone function properly. And that original code is copyright protected under several legislation of intellectual property.
On the other hand, all work on modifying the original game to add resources, features and whatever else you think to it — sometimes, even fixing problems — is still development work, and even independently, there is precedence on the right to charge money or give it away for free falling on the mod’s creator.
Normally, what we see is mods being offered for free through publisher supported channels. Bethesda does this all the time with Nexus Mods, for instance, even unifying the site’s and its own interface for direct download in the case of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, for instance.
However, what we “normally see” is not “normally an obligation”, and it befalls on each publisher to decide what happens with the code it owns. In the case of CD Projekt Red, the publisher has been mostly receptive to modding — just see how many things the community did with Witcher and even Cyberpunk 2077, up until now.
The problem in this case seems to be specific about the money Luke Ross is charging: not only the end user license agreement (EULA), but the DMCA legislation as well as the Berna Convention and other international treaties will treat mods as “derivative of the original code” — even if the mod work is, by itself, original. Remember, as separate as it is from the main game, a mod still needs the original source code (IP protected) to have a platform to run on. It’s not like you can play “just the mod”. You still need the game.
That is what puts this VR mod under scrutiny on CDPR’s IP hold over Cyberpunk 2077.
Not gonna lie, it does suck: I’m not much of a fan of VR gaming myself, but the segment does have a chunky following. Still, it is tough to merely criticize CDPR on this one…
But hey, Cyberpunk 2077’s Ultimate Edition for the Switch 2 is three bucks cheaper, so there’s that…
