MaFi Games has formally revoked the Modding Exception for COI-Extended.
I wanted to be fully transparent with the community about how we reached this point, from my perspective.
I have over 1,800 hours in Captain of Industry and was one of its biggest supporters for years. I created and maintained COI-Extended because I genuinely loved the game and wanted to contribute something positive to the community.
In late 2025 I made the personal decision to step away from the project. From my perspective at the time, the developers had begun releasing paid DLC while the game was still in Early Access. Their dev blog also contained language that appeared to characterize certain modding practices as those of “bad citizens.” I also did not want to undertake another full rewrite of large portions of the mod. For those reasons I chose to step back.
After I stepped away, a large number of players reached out to me — both privately and publicly — and asked me to return. Many also offered financial support through donations and expressed that they continued playing the game largely because of COI-Extended. After considering those requests for several weeks, I decided to resume development. I did so because I believed the community genuinely wanted the project to continue and I felt a responsibility to those who had supported it.
Upon returning, I observed that parts of my work appeared to have been copied by other modders and were being distributed as their own creations. After reviewing the code, it appeared to me — based on my experience and knowledge of software development — that substantial portions matched my original copyrighted material to a degree that went well beyond coincidence. Because the mod is closed-source and I hold the copyright, I took what I believed were the proper legal steps at the time and filed DMCA takedown notices with Discord for the specific content I considered infringing. Those notices were reviewed by Discord and the content was removed.
At no point did I ever speak directly to the developers about these DMCA actions. Any conversations that may have occurred with anyone else were done without my knowledge or direction and were not authorized to speak on my behalf.
MaFi Games has now formally revoked the Modding Exception for COI-Extended. The notice states that this revocation applies to me, anyone acting on behalf of or in coordination with the project, and covers any distribution, updates, forks, mirrors, re-uploads, or alternate accounts. They have asked that all public distributions be removed and that any continued distribution after this notice will be treated as unauthorized.
I acknowledge that decision here.
For context on the effort involved: while some features were able to be ported or adapted after the update, the compatibility work still required significant changes. This included rewriting save/load config schemas, creating a shared common library, and addressing numerous other breaking issues. To the best of my understanding at the time, this went beyond a minor update and felt like another major undertaking.
This situation has been difficult for many people involved. I have tried throughout to handle my own work and my own decisions as carefully as I could based on what I understood at the time. I continue to believe that protecting my original copyrighted material was the correct thing to do. At the same time, I respect that the developers have the contractual right under their policy to revoke the Modding Exception.
We will now take time to consider the best path forward for COI-Extended within our own community. I will continue to communicate with everyone here.
Thank you for reading this and for all the support you have given the project over the years. I truly appreciate it.
— Keranik
