Rockstar selling you cracked copies on Steam
Rockstar selling you cracked copies on Steam
I love the implication here, that they don't have the proper source (or skills left in the company) such that they can remove the DRM which doesn't play nice themselves so they rely on a cracked copy of the game instead. Been quite a bit of news lately about how game companies have failed to keep the original source code for their games. Diablo 2, the Transformers games etc and those from active companies, there's bound to be 1000s of games where the source is lost due to publishers closing down studios.
287Logical next step, hacker sues the developer for copyright infringement?
129I mean, they didn't even bother to remove the signature!
67The crack might not actually be protected by copyright, unless there's substantial new code added.
34
It's a complete crapshow IMO.
I still have the source code for the simple stuff I developed over 12 years ago, but these organisations don't think it's important to hang on to source code and assets for something they plan to make money from?
Really telling about the attitudes towards software outside of the FOSS space and datahoarder communities, and more importantly how little the management/publishers actually care about the product.
Although to counter that, I'm aware of at least one situation where the opposite has happened. One of my simulation games for example is really buggy and isn't able to receive more updates because the studio behind it voluntarily disbanded, leaving the publisher without access to the source code (I believe the publisher Aerosoft has tried to get a copy of the source to provide further game fixes, but the individuals behind the disbanded studio could not come to an agreement on this)
110I've had teams not bother to keep proper history when moving from subversion to git and I've also had a DevOps team entirely wipe the history of a new project just because cloning took a long time (and refused to attempt shallow cloning).
So the idea that a company just lets their code "rot" to the point of not even having it anymore because it's just some legacy thing from over a decade ago is totally unsurprising to me.
29
Even if they have the source, they may not have all the build tools anymore.
Or they have the build tools but the wizard that set up the build system back in the day no longer works there.
Or they have the build system archived and documented but it doesn't run because some license expired, and the tool vender doesn't sell that version anymore.
In the near future, there will be another possibility - SaaS cloud tools that are impossible to preserve so they are forever lost.
11Very true, and even if they could replace/remove libraries and dependencies that muck up the build process there are no guarantees that it'll play the same. So many games rely on strange quirks to function the way they do that would be nigh impossible to replicate purposely.
3
I'd say they probably still have the source. It looks like they did the same thing for Manhunt and Max Payne, but then pulled older, pre-SecuROM exes from their archives when they got busted.
7I don't know about Diablo 2, but Blizzard is so shady and messed up nowadays that I wouldn't be surprised that they "lost the source code" to prevent modders being able to port games, etc.
As for transformers, it was never lost (PCGamer, if you don't like Xfire). Hasbro claimed they wanted to provide access to legacy games, but completely made up that the source was lost. Now that we know that the source is still available... well, Hasbro clearly hasn't tried to rerelease those games.
(note: I know this is the same company, Activision Blizzard in both cases. For anyone reading who doesn't know, they were not the same company for the release of Diablo II, and a good amount of time afterwards.)
6
Remember that time a random player DRAMATICALLY decreased load times for GTA online after finding bad code that preloaded TONS of game assets? After like, a decade?
Pepperidge Farm remembers...
232I believe it was a CSV file of every item in all of the shops (comma separated values) and it was being read and stored into memory single threaded so it was maxing out a single core on the CPU.
65Are you talking about the guy that found a bug in the JSON parsing?
40Are you saying the INSANE GTA Online load time is fixed now?
Back in the old day, I literally just throw my hands up and said "I can't wait for this shit anymore, I don't have all day" then rage quit and delete the game.
18
Permanently Deleted
144The initial source (or at least the one linked to in the reddit post) is the vastly inferior microblogging version of xvideos though, so skipping reddit would have been even worse 🤷
80Wahhhhhh
-9
Source's source: https://twitter.com/_silent/status/1698345924840296801
74The nitter link: https://nitter.net/_silent/status/1698345924840296801
63
Better than their in-house attempts to remove anti-piracy measures. The Steam release of Manhunt has had all of its bullshit triggered for over ten years now. It's literally impossible to play without community patches.
Edit: Lol, as it turns out, Silent's discovery of this was triggered by the recent revelation of this about Manhunt!
55I spent hours trying to get that fucking game to work..
4Sad fact is, Rockstar doesn't give a shit. They got busted using a cracked EXE in the Steam release, so they just tried to cover their asses by using an old EXE without SecuROM. I expect the same thing from this game before long.
Couple lucky things for the players, though. First off, the Razor 1911 crack is still in the files, they just renamed it to testapp. Second, old RS games have a dedicated community that give way more of a shit about them than Rockstar ever will. Silent and Fire Head have both released major patches for Manhunt that not only get it running right, but fix a bunch of other broken shit that Rockstar never cared enough to deal with.
6
How about Microsoft pirating Windows for you?
44It's not really a crack, it's the corporate activation script. But yeah, MS don't care about sales anymore, they're all about stealing your data.
35The information the OS collects is not worth more than keeping you in the ecosystem itself. That's the more lucrative reasoning. Can't easily sell other products if they're not in Windows. The information collection is just gravy.
21
Or Ubisoft. A colleague of mine was super hyped for Far Cry 2, both the collector's edition but it wouldn't start on his PC. He contacted Ubisoft support and they gave him an actual scene crack. There were other reported cases of Ubisoft support handing out scene cracks to go around their shitty DRM.
"A" for effort for the support people in finding ways for customers to be happy and play the games they paid for. But a Steam release for a humongous corporation just straight up using the crack and releasing it as is, that's a new low.
26
Doesn't even surprise me anymore. Rockstar has gone to shit.
37cant even play their legitly purchased SINGLEPLAYER games without internet connection.
I fucking hate rockstar31Sometimes there is a trick that allows to play offline (I guess to bypass tags and restrictions), things like adding a line of text to a file, always a hassle and poorly documented.
Btw, I feel like telling that I deleted my rockstar account quite a while ago, they asked and re-asked nonsense, waiting from weeks to over a month between email and email, and the worst thing is that sometimes they were in chinese. It took me more than half a year to delete that crap.
5
What i'm looking at? What is this from?
29When you view or edit a text (.txt) file in a text editor like Notepad, you're most often opening a file in ASCII encoding that uses the ASCII binary values for common letters, numbers and punctuation. The only values allowed in that kind of file are lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and punctuation.
You can also view or edit binary files, like executables (.exe), but you typically need a hex editor. If you tried to open a binary file in a plain text editor it wouldn't know how to handle all the binary values that are not part of the standard ASCII set of letters, numbers and punctuation.
Hex editors show the data in hexadecimal format. They convert the binary data to numbers from 0 to 15 where the numbers 10 to 15 are replaced by the letters A to F. Often to make it clear people are talking about the hex number they add "0x" in front of the number. So, 0 becomes 0x0, 9 becomes 0x9, 15 becomes 0xF, 16 becomes 0x10, and 255 becomes 0xFF. This is an efficient way for people to work with binary data because 16 is 24 or 222*2.
Within binary files, there will still be a lot of sections that are in ASCII. For example, any error messages that have to be printed out for the user to see, like "this program cannot be operated in DOS mode".
Razor 1911 is an infamous cracker group that has been around for decades. They often "sign" the programs they crack by putting "Razor 1911" inside the files, in a way where you can see it if you open it with a hex editor, but so it doesn't affect the program.
So, what this is suggesting is that a program that Rockstar has released on Steam is not something they built themselves, but they're actually distributing a cracked version that was released by Razor 1911.
10
Not the first time, won't be the last.
15Vestigial DNA
14It means cracker fixed the issue for the developer, right?
13It means the publisher was too lazy/greedy to remove their ancient DRM themselves and just nabbed the work someone else did, slapped Steam Stub on top and sold it.
5
Imagine if they distributed one of those that contained a strange bind syscall somewhere with a reverse shell.
12They probably already do
Empress for sure at least.
1
Or its just a piracy check...
7Or the crack was an in-house job and they are just using the in-house patch to get around it.
5no breath
5
