Is FiveM shutting down? No — everything else did

No. FiveM is the one that is still here.

The confusion is fair, because two GTA multiplayer platforms have been shut down this year and FiveM’s name is in every headline about both. RAGE:MP’s infrastructure goes offline today, 31 August 2026. alt:V went dark on 6 July. Take-Two asked for both, and both teams told their users to move to FiveM — which Rockstar has owned since 2023.

So from tomorrow there is exactly one way to run a modded GTA V multiplayer server, and the company that makes GTA owns it.

Claim	Status
RAGE:MP’s client, backend and server toolkit go offline 31 August 2026	Confirmed — announced by the RAGE:MP team on their own forums
alt:V fully inoperable from 6 July 2026	Confirmed — announced by the alt:V team, 10 February 2026
Take-Two requested both closures	Confirmed — stated in both teams’ own announcements
FiveM is shutting down	No evidence — nothing from Cfx.re, Rockstar or Take-Two
Rockstar paid around $20m for Cfx.re in 2023	Reported — terms were never disclosed
FiveM will support GTA VI	Unconfirmed — no PC version announced, no Cfx.re statement

How FiveM ended up as the only door

What makes this worth writing down is that FiveM was the one Take-Two tried to kill first.

In 2015 Rockstar moved against it directly, describing FiveM as “an unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy” and banning its developers from GTA Online — reported at the time and never retracted since. FiveM survived it. Eight years later, in August 2023, Rockstar bought Cfx.re, the team behind it. The price was never disclosed; the figure reported afterwards was around $20 million, and that is a report, not a filing.

Then the direction reversed completely. On 12 January 2026 Rockstar launched the Cfx Marketplace, a storefront where FiveM and RedM creators sell server content. It opened with roughly sixteen creators and prices that raised eyebrows — a Theme Park add-on at $129.99, creator packs reported as high as $389.99. The company that spent a decade issuing takedowns now takes a cut.

Both shutdowns rest on the same document. alt:V and RAGE:MP each cited Rockstar and Take-Two’s Platform License Agreement, which names FiveM as the only authorised platform for GTA V multiplayer modding. RAGE:MP’s wording was flat: “Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive have made it clear that FiveM is the only authorized platform for GTAV multiplayer modding, as defined in their Platform License Agreement.” alt:V’s was warmer and sadder — “we’ve done our best to give you extra time to move your servers to their new home… All of us have put a huge amount of time and energy into building alt:V.” Nine years of work, and a thank-you note.

If you are hunting for an official statement that FiveM itself is ending, there isn’t one. We read the Cfx.re forum’s own shutdown tag this morning. It holds three threads, all of them people whose PCs switch off when they open the clothing menu.

What actually rides on that platform

Nobody has put a number on how big the thing Rockstar just finished consolidating actually is. We can, because roleplay is the visible face of FiveM and we count every live GTA stream on Kick, Twitch and YouTube once a minute.

Across 20 complete censuses between 04:06:39 and 04:29:38 UTC this morning — the live board plus the tail, publish timestamp matched, so the channel counts reconcile exactly against the platform totals — roleplay was about a third of all live GTA viewing.

Slice of live GTA	Mean viewers	Share	Mean channels	Share
Everything	125,082	100%	1,809	100%
Roleplay (classifier)	43,510	34.8%	656	36.3%
…plus titles naming RP, FiveM or a whitelist	44,523	35.6%	685	37.9%
Single-player mods	843	0.7%	12	0.7%

That is not a fluke of one sample. The roleplay share sat between 33.0% and 35.6% in every one of the twenty censuses, and the channel share between 35.5% and 37.0%. It also lines up with the 40% of channels we measured a week ago when we asked whether GTA RP is dying, which it is not.

Roughly a third of the live GTA audience, then, is watching something that only exists because a modding platform exists — and as of tomorrow there is one of those, owned by the publisher.

The split by platform is the part that surprised us:

Platform	RP viewers	RP as a share of that platform’s GTA viewing
Kick	24,685	30.6%
Twitch	14,126	41.5%
YouTube	4,698	45.7%

Kick carries the most roleplay viewers in absolute terms, because Kick carries the most GTA viewers full stop. But roleplay is a larger fraction of what Twitch and YouTube audiences watch. If FiveM ever wobbled, Twitch’s GTA category would feel it harder than Kick’s would, which is the reverse of what the raw totals suggest.

And it is concentrated. The top 10% of roleplay channels held 85.1% of all roleplay viewing, in a band of 84.6% to 85.6% across the twenty samples. A platform decision does not land evenly on a population like that; it lands on a few dozen large servers and their audiences.

What this does not show

• We cannot see which client a stream is running. We read titles and categories, not processes. Roleplay on GTA V PC means FiveM in practice, but the mapping is an inference, not a measurement, and a slice of what we file as roleplay will be running on something else.
• freeroam is our fallback bucket, so streams that are roleplay but say so in ways our classifier misses are counted against roleplay, not for it. The 35.6% ceiling row is our attempt at that correction and it is almost certainly still low.
• This is a 23-minute window at 04:00 UTC, a population that skews Brazilian and Spanish-language. The mix moves several points across a day; we have written before about how much the hour you sample decides what you find.
• The community reported to be hit hardest is the one we can barely see. Coverage of the RAGE:MP closure has stressed the Russian-speaking servers built on it. In our window, Russian-language streams were 520 viewers across all of live GTA and 7 within roleplay. That is not evidence the scene is small; it is evidence it does not stream on the three platforms we watch. We would rather say so than quietly publish a zero.
• Watching is not playing. Every figure here is an audience, not a player count. A server with no streamers on it is invisible to us however busy it is.

The wrinkle nobody has priced in

FiveM runs on GTA V on PC. GTA VI ships on 19 November for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and Rockstar’s own product page still lists no PC version. No PC version means no FiveM build, which means that on launch night none of the audience in the table above has anywhere to move — a chain we worked through when we asked whether GTA 6 will have roleplay servers.

That is the strange shape of this month. Rockstar has spent 2026 consolidating every modded GTA multiplayer server onto a platform it owns, and is putting the most famous roleplay server in the world inside its own launcher on 8 September; NoPixel V’s launch trailer premieres tomorrow, 1 September, with a countdown for it running on nopixel.net as we publish. All of it is built on a game that came out in 2013, and none of it can follow players into GTA VI for as long as the new game stays off PC.

The answer to the question, then, is not just “no”. It is that FiveM spent ten years as the thing Rockstar wanted gone and is ending 2026 as the only door Rockstar left open — and about a third of everyone watching GTA right now is on the other side of it.

Sources, and how to check us

The measurements above come from 20 complete censuses taken between 04:06:39 and 04:29:38 UTC on 31 August 2026, each one the live board plus the tail with the publish timestamp matched across both, so per-platform sums reconcile exactly against the totals; mean live GTA audience across the window was 125,082 viewers on 1,809 channels, all three platforms, with no platform reporting degraded coverage. Roleplay classification is from stream titles and categories.

If you want to quote any of it, the permalink is https://luciastream.com/blog/is-fivem-shutting-down/, the sampling window is the one named above, and the collection method is documented at luciastream.com/methodology. The same numbers sit behind our live board, which samples every 60 seconds, so you can check whether any of this still holds by the time you are reading it. If it has moved, that is the more interesting finding, and we would rather hear about it than have you take our word for a Monday morning in August.

Platform dates are from the RAGE:MP and alt:V teams’ own announcements as reported by Dexerto, RockstarINTEL and GTA BOOM.