We’re back with more Cyberpunk 2077 modding drama, except less minor this time.

There’s a mod called R.E.A.L. VR by Luke Ross, which lets people use VR headsets to play some games that don’t natively support VR. One of those games was Cyberpunk 2077, until just recently when CD Projekt Red ordered him to stop.

CDPR’s argument was that 2077 is their game and they’re the ones allowed to make money off of it. They don’t object to modding per se or to some limited monetization of fan content (their policy explicitly permits monetized YouTube and Twitch videos, and Nexus Mods is slightly monetized now), but Ross keeps his mods behind a $10-a-month Patreon paywall and they’re just not OK with that. A donation page would be acceptable…

Ross’ counterargument was that he has the right to make money off of his coding work, his subscribers are getting a VR experience that CDPR hasn’t provided, and CDPR wants to destroy his mod for no reason other than (as Meredith Stout would say) “only the corp gets what it wants.”

Buuuuut…

Ralf Ostertag’s vorpX can be used to play 2077 in VR, and at time of writing it’s still available. And while its 2077-only demo is free, the full version isn’t; the corpos behind the hundreds of other games vorpX advertises compatibility with could have swarmed it under at any time.

The first difference between vorpX and R.E.A.L. is that vorpX sells for a flat price, which is seemlier than a monthly subscription. The second and probably more important difference is that vorpX is less a mod for 2077 (or any other game) than it is a DirectX compatibility tool that helps you play 3D-rendered games on a headset, whereas R.E.A.L. seems to need a plugin written for each game (if Ross’ promise of expedited Baldur’s Gate 3 compatibility to keep his subscribers happy is anything to go by).

And while I’m generally unsympathetic to corporate content-striking, and I agree with Ross that CDPR is only doing this for the money… so is Ross.

He doesn’t list his current monthly income on his Patreon page (some users do, some don’t, that isn’t in itself suspicious). When he was interviewed by The Verge a few years ago, though, he was making something like $20,000 a month.

He describes himself as “a little bitter” about recent events, and with that much money at risk, I think I believe him.

 

Maybe it’s just me, coming to modding from the direction of the Elder Scrolls games, where paid mods are a permanently touchy subject and the modding community’s norms dictate putting your wares in front of any paywall. (Even Bethesda’s official paid mods are widely scorned.)

But in this case, I don’t see the little guy as being inherently more righteous than the big guy just because he’s smaller. The conflict between them is ethically neutral, with money-hunger motivating both sides, and no one (other than R.E.A.L.’s preexisting fans) has a natural rooting interest in the outcome.

…I’m sort of defending the corp that tried to trademark the word “cyberpunk,” aren’t I? Damn, that feels unnatural.