Comic for Monday 11/15 (Early High Res) (Patreon)

It's bananas that video games on a corporate level so routinely fumble the interaction with video games on a modding level.

These businesses have a right and a responsibility to protect their brand, of course, but often the nature by which they go about it seems so unnecessarily hostile that I wish I could sit in on some of these meetings at a higher level just to hear the rationale.

Video game publishers deciding to shut down the passion projects of modders, working for free and for the benefit of the community, is nothing new. But rarely do we see such a high profile crackdown on mods followed immediately by such a colossal fumble.

Not only did Take Two decide to DMCA a bunch of GTA mods ( a game series that has long had a very active and healthy mod community) ahead of their GTA Remastered release, but they also turned around and completely dropped the ball on the Remasters, putting out work of lower quality than the free mods they went so far to have removed.

It's full of bugs, glitches and, if you bought it on PC, completely unplayable going on three days now due to problems with the Rockstar games launcher. And now they've alienated the very community that would be the ones to swoop in and fix the games problems with tweaks and mods.

It's just such a bafflingly comprehensive fail on every front.