Luke Ross removes access to all VR mods

Email Sent out to Subscribers:

If you have been following VR news, you will already know that on January 9, 2026, multibillion-dollar company CD PROJEKT S.A. fired a DMCA notice targeting my Patreon, demanding the takedown of my VR mod for Cyberpunk 2077 "because access to the mod is paid".

The notice came out of the blue, after almost 4 years of absolute silence from the company, despite my early attempts, dating as far back as 2022, to reach an agreement with them in order to make the conversion official or at least officially sanctioned.

Patreon complied with the request right away, taking the mod down before even informing me. When I found out what had happened, I immediately contacted the legal department at CD PROJEKT S.A., but again received zero response. Later on I found a way to get in touch with their VP of business development, who replied politely but without addressing my attempts at finding a solution that would not be hurtful for CP2077 gamers and VR lovers; after a week, and upon further prompting on my side, their legal department finally replied by saying that they had "no objection to [the] mod being made available again, provided that it is offered entirely free of charge".

You can find more details here and if you want to get even more depressed you can also read about the rampant piracy of my software that immediately followed as a consequence of CD PROJEKT's actions, before I could even have a chance to figure out how to make a special version of the framework that provided freebie conversion for CP2077 without impacting all the other supported games. The haters of VR, and defenders of some God-given right to free mods for commercial games, found me guilty and sentenced us to be punished by taking away what we had worked for.

Despite Flat2VR swiftly pouncing to pitch a "proper" conversion done by their Flat2VRStudios, CDPR has not responded. Who knows, maybe they are worried about the comparison to their Viture x Cyberpunk, AI-driven 3D-conversion glasses. Maybe there is too much difference yet between AI-faked 3D and actual stereo VR rendering. I have no idea.

- Domino effect

Fast forward to today, and another publisher just sent a DMCA takedown notice to Patreon: namely 505 Games, for my VR conversion of Ghostrunner. No mention of any terms of service violation this time. Again Patreon automatically complied. I don't blame them; DMCA law is carefully worded to give infinite power to big companies, who only need to write on a slip of paper that they "believe" their copyright has been infringed in order to nuke from the sky anything they don't like—and to give infinite headaches to creators like me, who instead have the only recourse of going to court, sustaining huge costs to get through the legal process.

But as a consequence, "[...] Patreon, in accord with copyright law, will terminate accounts that are the subject of repeated, compliant notifications of claimed copyright infringement. Thus, it is important that you avoid posting material that will subject your account to further claims of copyright infringement."

Please note the wording. It doesn't matter whether I'm guilty or not of copyright infringement; my account (and the investment you made with your hard earned money in supporting me) can be vaporized discretionarily just because of "claims".

- What happens now?

In light of the above facts, I'm being forced to take immediate action. I'm making unavailable all versions of the mods and also all the posts related to the wonderful work we have done here together for years, so that there will be no ground for further claims. And since I cannot stop people from subscribing without closing down the account altogether, I'm making it clear on the About and Welcome pages that new subscriptions will have the only effect of supporting me and that no access to the 40+ conversions can or will be provided at this time.

You don't need to unsubscribe: I paused the billing cycle for one month so that your pledges will NOT be renewed automatically, and those of you who are already subscribed will have their access extended for one month without further payments. I hope one month will be enough for the fog to clear up, and to understand what is going to happen to our collective attempt to make VR available for AAA games. To boldly go where no publisher wants to go (or to let us go) anymore.

Note that making the mod freely available is by no means the clear-cut solution that people on the Internet would make it to be, because DMCA superpowers given to big companies and payments/donations needed for complex projects like this one are two completely unrelated matters. We have direct proof of that, as you'll remember that Take-Two included in their takedown request also my GTA V mod which had always been completely free (I never even accepted donations for that one).

Speaking of which, CD PROJEKT S.A. says that fans can accept "reasonable" donations for their mods. But what is "reasonable"? I was quoted several times during these past few years that producing a full-fledged VR conversion for a triple-A game requires an investment in the order of several million dollars (if the original engine team is still available and not already disbanded or busy with the next project, and if the artists are still working on the game assets), up to tens of millions if a new team has to learn the ropes and intricacies of the engine and new artists or specialized tools are required to change the graphics assets and animations.

People on the web are thirsty for blood because back in the GTA V and RDR 2 era, an article came out stating that I was raising $20,000 a month. Is that "reasonable"? Assuming that overall the work I poured into making my software support Cyberpunk, turning it into the "most immersive gaming experience" some people had in their lives, amounted to a few months, say $50,000: is that "reasonable" according to the arbitrary criteria of Cyberpunk's publisher? Something tells me it wouldn't be considered reasonable, despite being a tiny fraction of the many millions they would have to invest for porting CP2077 to VR themselves, and despite the fact that the cost was entirely financed by passionate gamers and none of it was incurred by CD PROJEKT.

Hopefully we'll find a way together, in the next few weeks. But if we can't, we'll always have the memories of the wonderful times we spent in those beautiful virtual worlds. Oh and by the way: if you have existing copies of the mods that you downloaded here before all this drama, you will of course be able to use them indefinitely and without restrictions, just like people have been doing for years with the RDR2 mod, as long as the games do not get breaking updates from the publishers.