It looks like trouble is brewing over at the roleplayer's paradise.
NoPixel, which is widely considered the biggest and most popular Grand Theft Auto 5 roleplaying server, is at the receiving end of a lawsuit from one of the people who worked on it for two years.
Danny Tracey, who's perhaps best known to GTA RPers as either DW or dwjft, is a software engineer who worked on NoPixel servers from 2020 to 2022 before he found himself fired for no reason last December 28.
At the time, GTA RP community members noticed Tracey had lost his credentials and many speculated that he might have infiltrated the NoPixel servers after his sudden termination.
However, as per the upcoming lawsuit, Tracey had no idea about his firing. Furthermore, the accusation that he was trying to "access private user information" was bollocks. Tracey was just trying to do his job as a server developer at the time because, again, he wasn't aware NoPixel had fired him already. Because of this, Tracey now wants to sue NoPixel for a total sum of $150,000 for the streaming revenue he lost and the server's refusal to pay him his cut of the revenue.
The skinny of the legal document is that Tracey wants to get paid because NoPixel fired him without offering an explanation and for his "significant creative contributions" to NoPixel, specifically, the "entire payment processing system."
Depending on how the courts rule on the lawsuit, Tracey could be in line for a big payday. It's possible that he could file a copyright claim as an aggrieved third party on the backend infrastructure of NoPixel that he helped create.
Of course, NoPixel could decide to remove Tracey's contributions from NoPixel completely and rebuild the system from scratch, but it could stand to lose more than what Tracey is demanding as payment.
It will be a while before the courts determine the outcome of the lawsuit, but it's merely the latest in a long line of controversies surrounding NoPixel. Most recently, Penta, the server's top streamer, has left and he hopes others will follow him. But, xQc doesn't quite agree that this is easy to do as we're talking about people's livelihoods. Some streamers don't have a choice but to stick with NoPixel because they can't afford to lose the steady income and viewership it provides despite the massive backlash the server has gotten lately.
