Creator of DMCA'd Cyberpunk VR mod takes ball and goes home, removing access to all his VR mods after receiving a second DMCA takedown from 505 Games and a warning from Patreon

Last week, creator of the popular paid-access Cyberpunk 2077 R.E.A.L. VR mod Luke Ross found himself at the center of a growing controversy after receiving a DMCA notice from Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt, which claimed the modder was profiting from its IP. The studio had earlier requested that Ross make the mod free to download, but rather than submit to what he called "iron-clad corpo logic," Ross instead made the VR mod unavailable.

Now, after receiving a second DMCA notice from publisher 505 Games over his VR conversion mod for Ghostrunner, Ross has opted for the nuclear option and removed access to all 40+ of his VR mods from his Patreon rather than distribute them for free.

"Due to DMCA notices received from CD Projekt S.A. and 505 Games, I am forced to temporarily pause the Patreon page," says a disclaimer on the About page of Ross's Patreon. "You can still subscribe if you want to support me, but be advised that for the moment there will be no benefits available. No access to the 40+ mods or detailed information about my VR conversions, until the legal situation clears out."

On Reddit, users have shared an email that was supposedly sent out yesterday to Ross's Patreon subscribers. To give you an idea of the tone, the alleged email summarizes the last week of the Cyberpunk mod controversy as "the haters of VR, and defenders of some God-given right to free mods for commercial games found me guilty and sentenced us to be punished by taking away what we had worked for." So, you know. That's cool.

The email explains that receiving a second DMCA takedown from 505 Games triggered a warning from Patreon, who informed Ross that it "will terminate accounts that are the subject of repeated, compliant notifications of copyright infringement" and that he must "avoid posting material that will subject your account to further claims of copyright infringement."

Luke Ross Removes Access to All Mods from r/virtualreality

Ross doesn't blame Patreon for complying with the Ghostrunner DMCA, the email says, because "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." Which, to its credit, isn't exactly disproven by the itchy DMCA trigger fingers that major companies have brandished over the years.

Many of those companies—CDPR included—have shown a willingness to leave modders unheckled as long as they aren't directly receiving payments for modding the company's software. But rather than following the typical protocol of making his mods available for free while directing grateful users to his Patreon as a form of donational support, the email says that Ross was "forced to take immediate action" of a different kind.

"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," the email says. In its generosity, it also informs recipients that they "don't need to unsubscribe" if they don't want to.

"Hopefully we'll find a way together, in the next few weeks," the email concludes. "But if we can't, we'll always have the memories of the wonderful times we spent in those beautiful virtual worlds."

In the hours since the email was sent, Ross has tweeted a quoted section from CD Projekt's Wikipedia page, which describes how founder Marcin Iwiński had previously sold cracked videogame copies in high school. If we're meant to be keeping score, I'm not sure that wins anyone a point.