A veritable feature-length book about the creation of the popular GTA 5 multiplayer mod FiveM, as well as the drama amongst its team, and even how some associated devs are allegedly connected to GTA 5's source code leaking publicly in December 2023 has been published, and there's a lot to unpack.
FiveM was first created back in 2015, not long after GTA 5's release on PC. Users can create custom, dedicated servers to play on – for example, for roleplay, which is perhaps what the project is best known for. It became so notable within the community that many years after its inception, in 2023, Rockstar Games itself actually acquired Cfx.re – the name of the team behind the mod. Externally, this seemed like a huge deal for fans of GTA RP, but apparently this wasn't without problems within the team.
The community-written essay covering everything, titled "The Fall of FiveM," is absolutely enormous. Like, so enormous that it'd probably take most of the day to read through the entire thing. Seriously, we're talking around 73,000 words here, and that's not counting all the Discord screenshots – that's genuinely longer than a lot of books. Needless to say, we won't be going into the whole thing here, but the TL;DR included at the end of the essay helps summarise a lot of the main points.
Namely, it claims that, prior to the acquisition, certain modders joined the FiveM team, and one allegedly attempted to secretly sell the project to Rockstar. The original creator of the project eventually got on board with this idea – hence the acquisition in 2023 – but was then allegedly suspended and eventually kicked out from Rockstar entirely following a campaign from those same newly-arrived modders.
Eventually, it's claimed that more new team members were brought on board who were allegedly given confidential information, including access to the next GTA 5 build, which reportedly ended up being shared with their friends. Furthermore, it's also alleged that this same group "are secretly responsible for the Christmas 2023 GTA 5 source code leak." In the full section on this, it's claimed that this source code was first rumored to have leaked in 2022, but it was publicly leaked in December the following year. Reportedly, those new team members pooled their money together to buy access to the source code from a leaker, but the link they were sent was later shared publicly (complete with its password) by one of the buyers in the group.
As it stands, reportedly no original FiveM developers are still on the project, and it's claimed that it's planned to be killed off in favor of an upcoming project known as ROME (or Rockstar Online Modding Engine), which is apparently being worked on within Rockstar. "Given FiveM’s success, the expectations for ROME are high," the essay claims. "With the source code, they should be able to make a FiveM that is at least 5-10x better in every aspect. We’ll just have to wait and see."
All in all, there are a lot of huge claims and allegations in the essay, and it's worth noting that the original mod team don't appear to be the ones who wrote it. Wrapping up the TL:DR, it's stated that "well-known members of the community, interested in what happened to FiveM, formed a coalition to write and publish this article," and contacted "many associates of Cfx and R* to compile information."
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