There’s no denying the fact that Rockstar Games is a giant in the gaming industry. One of the major reasons behind this has to be the community that has been formed around their games. Fans have done everything possible to make Rockstar’s games as fun as possible for the community. In the same way, one of the fans started working on a project that is very popularly known as FiveM.
What started as a fun project by a single person has now turned into one big mess. From Rockstar trying to get rid of the project initially to acquiring it completely. There are a lot of things that need to be uncovered. Buckle up, as this is going to be a long one. Let’s uncover the entire story, from the rise to the unfortunate downfall of FiveM.
Also Read: Here’s Why GTA 6 Won’t Be Woke
Before we move further, you need to know that all of this information was taken from an exposed post. The post in the talk here was released by a community of people who were interested in knowing about FiveM, they reached out to a lot of community memebrs from the project; it is titled “The Fall of FiveM” It claims that none of the original developers are left and the project may be shut down soon by Rockstar.
What is FiveM?
Well, for the readers who are unaware of FiveM, let me give you a brief description first. See FiveM is a popular mod for GTA 5, as it allows players to play multiplayer. Well, you might be wondering, since GTA Online has already been a thing since the start, why are gamers even interested in a third-party party program? Now, that’s because FiveM allows players to play on customised servers. Gamers can roleplay as different characters, which adds a very fun element and adds immersion to the game.
These servers are run by individuals or organizations rather than Rockstar’s servers. Since they’re not run by Rockstar, players can create and join servers with unique rules, gameplay modes, and other such modifications. There is a bunch of custom content present that includes custom cars, maps, and weapons. It is one of the biggest community-driven online mod projects to date. Just to give you an idea of how big the project is, over 100,000 players are playing the game using FiveM right now. That’s a huge number, given this is a third-party service.
How was FiveM started?
It wasn’t a very easy start for FiveM. Let’s just say that it was off to a very rough start. The project was started by a person called ‘NTA’, and they go by the username @ntauthority on Twitter. The idea was first thought out for GTA 4; however, it got implemented for GTA 5. The idea was that players could create their own game modes and custom content in a user-friendly way.
Development started right after GTA 5 was released on PC, and it was released to the public very shortly after. After the mod became public, Take-Two wasn’t very happy with it. They started their attempts to try and take down the project very early. They banned the accounts of 3 FiveM community members, including that of NTA. They commented on the bans and said that the project was an “unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy.”
NTA, instead of shutting down the project, stopped the public distribution of the client. However, work on the project continued. So what does Rockstar do in return? They sent out private investigators to NTA’s house. Yes, private investigators. They confronted NTA about the situation, and shortly after that, a legal case was filed. Due to financial constraints, NTA could not afford to fight the case. This only meant that the case was closed, and NTA was legally prohibited from working on anything related to Take-Two properties.
But the story doesn’t end there. FiveM had already gained a lot of popularity in the GTA community. Due to the project being an open-source one, it meant that it was open to the public. So shortly after, revival projects emerged; this made NTA realize that people still cared about his project. So by the end of 2016, NTA resumed his work on FiveM, making sure they were incognito this time. FiveM had been taken over by a new team, which is still known as Cfx.re.
The Rise of FiveM
Now that the project is safe, you might wonder how it gained so much popularity. As the development continued, new features were added regularly. Server limits were increased, and more servers were created. The project did take off. It started to get popular among the GTA community. Servers like SOE and Family RP were the ones that were very popular initially; after that, many content creators got into NoPixel, which is still very popular.
Given the popularity of FiveM, Cfx.re, the team behind the project, also released a similar mod for Red Dead Redemption 2. It was announced shortly after the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 was released in 2019. The mod was intended to work alongside FiveM and was released around two months after the game’s launch. NTA took on the RedM, as it also provided an opportunity to expand their open-source project.
But the biggest breakthrough for FiveM came with the coming of COVID-19. While playing the game was a big part of the popularity, YouTube and Twitch streamers also helped grow the project, as people enjoyed watching FiveM streams too. It was reported that FiveM grew from 50,000 concurrent players at the beginning of 2020 to over 170,000 concurrent players by early 2021. Given that the project was still maintained solely by NTA and other community contributors during this time, it is very impressive.
To get more work done, the project needed more people. The project’s earnings finally made it possible to hire a few employees. That’s when it happened; that’s when the project started to get more people onboard. Although NTA wasn’t open to the idea of adding more people on board because it meant managing more people, they anyway did end up hiring them.
Why did Rockstar acquire FiveM?
So far, so good, right? The project is doing so well; there’s an entire team now, and everything looks great. Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Remember when I said the team was expanding? NTA had hired a few people, although they looked great at first; however, they are what caused all this mess. The people in question here formed a group within the team, and they’ve been referred to as the ‘Groot Gang‘ in the expose post. They are the reason that led to FiveM being acquired by Rockstar.
Despite all the challenges, the project was still doing great and was very successful. You’d think, How come someone like Rockstar Games, who once tried shutting down the project, even acquired it? There’s a very interesting story to that. The original developer, NTA, obviously did not want that, since they had already been asked not to work on the project; however, as previously stated, FiveM’s Team had expanded quite a bit now. Management was poor, right from the start. Aside from NTA and a few other people, the Groot Gang members did no work. But they were still involved and had a good relationship with NTA.
The first contact between Rockstar and Cfx.re was made around October 2022. But the most surprising part is that it was not NTA who contacted them. Groot, seeing an opportunity for him and his friends, secretly tried to reach out to Rockstar Games. While they had no authority to do so, since NTA was the owner of the project, they leaked all the personal and financial data of the company. All of this was done just so they would impress Rockstar. The Groot Gang was in contact with Ethan Hirsch, who is responsible for the acquisition by Rockstar. He showed interest in modding and was very interested in FiveM. Once NTA learned all this, they were mad at first.
However, they did end up signing on Rockstar’s offer. It is revealed that the project was sold to Rockstar for roughly 20 months of the project’s income. This was done thinking that partnering with Rockstar would bring more structure, resources, and proper management. Ethan promised a lot of future developments, further cooperation with modding, and help from Rockstar Games to make FiveM and RedM better.
The Downfall of FiveM
I’d like to start talking about the unfortunate downfall of FiveM by first quoting Benny from Fallout New Vegas, “Truth is, the game was rigged from the start.” Well since, the same can be said here too. I’ll get back to this in a while. Let’s first talk about the FiveM team’s first week at Rockstar. The entire Groot Gang started their first week at Rockstar by complaining about NTA. There was a lot of trash talking about NTA. So much happened that at some point they managed to piss off NTA, which led to them being suspended for about 3 weeks.
It turns out that all the Groot Gang members somehow managed to convince Ethan that they were the “visionaries” of FiveM during their initial talks. Later, they were made seniors, managers, and even directors. These FiveM staff were automatically placed into the GTA 5 Credits too. So, Ethan was a bit favorable towards the Groot Gang. What makes it even worse is that the core members, like NTA, were completely left out.
NTA returned after his suspension; however, that wasn’t for too long. They were shortly suspended after that for another three months on the basis of complaints made by the team. While their suspension should have been lifted, there were no updates. But later, after a lot of back and forth, Rockstar flagged a contract violation and terminated any work-related contact with NTA.
This was the beginning of the end. The unfortunate downfall of FiveM. The original developer, who worked on the project from the start, was off the project. Seeing all this drama, every single original developer for FiveM was gone too. As of today, FiveM is in the worst technical condition. Things like critical exploits, feature requests and bug reports are being ignored. No one knows what will happen to FiveM.
Rockstar’s Own Project ‘ROME’
We recently reported that Rockstar was trying to expand their even further by making it the next creator platform like Roblox and Fortnite. It was reported that they wanted to create ‘custom experiences’ in GTA 6, in other words, making the game a creator platform like Roblox. Not only that, but the company has also approached some dedicated GTA content creators too. You can read the full report from here Rockstar wants to make GTA 6 the next creator platform.
Further details have been released, and it turns out that the creator platform in question here is Project ‘ROME.’ Remember, I quoted Benny’s dialogue? “The game was rigged from the start.” It turns out that the entire FiveM division was a lie right from the start. The true objective for the FiveM team is to just ensure the money keeps rolling in, there is nothing planned for FiveM, so that Rockstar’s own project “ROME” takes over. Aside from getting content creators in on the project, the popular server of FiveM, ‘NoPixel’ has also been given early-access to ROME.
The Final Acknowledgements section of the expose post reads, “None of the original development team members regret their decision to leave the project. It was a terrible environment that also was draining everyone’s mental health. However, all of them regret that they didn’t try to stop NTA from selling the project. We know for sure that some of the current employees share this feeling as well. Some of the original team members regret they didn’t leave shortly after NTA’s permanent suspension.”
This was pretty much it. we’ve covered about everything about the unfortunate downfall of FiveM. Right from the start of the project, how it was created, the challenges the developers had to face initially, to the rise of the project, to then how Rockstar came into the picture, and at the end how the downfall started. All of this is a pretty sad story. There are even more things that the original post mentions, if you’re interested, you should definitely check it out.
