Whenever a big corp decides to buy/acquire a small good team/product with passionate community, never take it in a positive way, at least in the long term.
R* might change those roleplay servers into SaaS to make money out of it, they might fire the good engineers/or engineers just quit after they are fed up with corp BS, R* might restrict some of these server’s features that got these servers popular in the first place like car’s types etc., so who knows.
Yup, given how "well" Mojang handled their acquisition of bukkit (the modded server that gave players a wide choice of plugins and was the cornerstone of multiplayer), with it collapsing near immediately and really only living on as the legacy API other alternative server options use... And they were at the time one of the darlings off the games industry...
I've zero belief in anything about this being good long term given what R* and take two have done the last few years..
On the other hand, the small team were taking a cut from every monetized server. Literally profiting millions of off Rockstar's work. If servers don't charge for entry, they charge for extra content R* developed for and sells in GTA:O.
They call it "donations", but it's not donations; they just copied the microtransaction model from GTA:O without actually making the content themselves.
Honestly, this sounds like a good decision that'll benefit both the modders and Rockstar. Rockstar stops looking like the bad person and is able to better ID the needs of modders, and the modders get a lot more access than they previously had.
R* might change those roleplay servers into SaaS to make money out of it, they might fire the good engineers/or engineers just quit after they are fed up with corp BS, R* might restrict some of these server’s features that got these servers popular in the first place like car’s types etc., so who knows.