In Retrospective - GTAPoliceMods shutdown

[Hullian111]

It's been nearly a year since gtapolicemods shut down. And now, in retrospective, the lack of answers and broken promises makes me sad at the state of GTA IV's dwindling modding community.

 

I'm still motivated to mod GTA IV, yes - just picked up the latest version of the Warrener - but gtapolicemods used to host some great mods that I really wanted to use - a police Huntley, a police Sultan, lots of vanilla emergency cars modified and templated, and batons and the like. But come around about the start of this year? Whoops, it's all gone, with no advance warning.

 

So I start questioning it all. Put out warnings on my mods on LCPDFR (thankfully, an ambulance model is now downloadable again), start threads giving FAQs on the developing situation. BxBugs comes out, says there'll be an archive on HighSpeedGaming in the coming months, rereleases some NYPD mods. No offense to him, he's a great modder, yet I think he's completely forgotten about the small corner that has become GTA IV.

 

I can't even play GTA V. Why? I screwed up the serials when we had slow WiFi that was due for an upgrade. I spent a whole day installing it, and got too eager with mods, and somehow, I did it wrong. So sadly, I can't get involved properly with the GTA V scene, and I have to stick around with a nearly ten-year-old dodgy PC port.

 

Speaking of ten years old, I know GTA IV is coming to end-of-life in terms of modding now. GTAGaming got hacked, and shut down. Yet, they put up a splash screen, said they were going to archive, and did it, albeit losing some mods and having a rather-dodgy search system. Less people are downloading mods for GTA IV - and even if they are, they're not the big boys anymore like Speirs, the Code Zero gang, and other LCPDFR YouTubers, to name a few. It's a sad state that GTA IV has come to, but not everything can last forever.

 

Which is a shame that gtapolicemods had to die out in this way. There was no warning, there was no information, just some 'account suspended' screen. I didn't even know the site had shut down at first - I thought I had an IP ban from it for some reason. And nearly a year on, we still don't have an archive. Having to scavenge for replacement models and mods that were slightly-shadily reuploaded elsewhere is now a chore. I've said it once, and I'll say it again - where is the archive?