Take-Two has forced the shutdown of one of the most popular ways of modding Grand Theft Auto. It says it ordered the removal of the OpenIV tool because it was enabling player harassment in GTA Online.

The developers of OpenIV say they received a legal letter from Take Two earlier this month demanding a shutdown. They added that although they believed the tool itself was legal, fighting the demand in court would take time and money they didn’t have.

OpenIV should continue to work (for now at least) but there’ll be no updates and it’s no longer available to download. Users who run GTA with mods in place will see a warning message suggesting they uninstall OpenIV, but aren’t currently being forced to do so.

In the past, Take-Two has taken a relatively relaxed attitude to PC modding of GTA. It’s now implied this might not be a permanent block as, via Rockstar Games, it issued the following statement:

Take-Two’s actions were not specifically targeting single player mods. Unfortunately OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody. We are working to figure out how we can continue to support the creative community without negatively impacting our players.