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Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

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Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#141

Post by EvanAnderson »

bri3d wrote: post #105
freejazz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people on HN understand what a derivative work is, considering how often I see it referenced incorrectly. You can't make a derivative work without a license. That's why it's derivative. It derivates from the copyrighted work and is therefore within the domain of the copyright and under the control of the copyright's owner. A Harry Potter spin-off about Hermione (I don't know anything about HP, sorry in…

If the patch is distributed on its own, without the original binary, is it still a derivative work? Is the unique, creative work of writing "perform XYZ instruction at XYZ address," in lieu of the original executable, still derivative? This is actually an unanswered/unproven question that comes up quite a bit in automotive tuning, where individuals and tuning companies modify OEM calibrations and create application s…

The history of General Computer Corporation's[0] arcade enhancement boards is an interesting example of this kind of "derivative" work.

GCC made an enhancement board for Missile Command and later for Pac Man ("Crazy Otto", which became "Ms. Pac Man"). Rather than employing simple "ROM hacks" as other enhancement board manufacturers did, GCC specifically built their enhancement hardware not to contain any code copied from the original game ROM. Their hardware patched the existing ROM only by overlaying their code onto the original ROMs, not by copying any of the original code[1].

There's some neat detail in the background slides here[2]. I'd love to hear that talk but I'm not immediately a recording of it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Computer_Corporation

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/sts145/Notes/3_game_business/...

[2] https://trilobyte.com/pdf/golson_ReplayFX_2015.pdf

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#142

Post by justapassenger »

PeterisP wrote: post #109
justapassenger wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many many many people "cracked" their software who where not eganged in the act of copyright infringement, they legally owned the software but for a number of reasons has no desire to run the invasive software bundled with the game or content they purchased. Yes, many people. But not “many many many” people. You try to make it sound like cracking to pirate was minority use case. It was a valid use case, sure, but a…

I seem to recall that for some games the community recommended fix for performance problems was to install a crack so that the game wouldn't try to read stuff from the CD, which might be slow depending on the drive you have, and would be very slow if the CD has some scratch so the drive repeatedly attempted to read the same spot until it succeeded.

Sure, and I don't question that. But at the same time - 99% of people outside of western countries had pirated copies of games (because it was legal in many countries, plus paying normal price was often month+ salary for a single game). Tons of teenagers from western countries (main gamers back in the days) had pirated games, unless they came from a rich family.

Cracks helped to fix some serious usability issues (as DRM removal nowadays also helps with), but let's not rewrite history to pretend that was what majority of people used them for.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#143

Post by lxgr »

Steltek wrote: post #101
Ekaros wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those modifications have a copy-right they do not own...

A compiler author does not own the output of the compiler.

Is that always the case, or does it depend on the compiler's license in the end?

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#144

Post by alphablended »

Steltek wrote: post #101
Ekaros wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those modifications have a copy-right they do not own...

A compiler author does not own the output of the compiler.

No, but any other source (eg. headers) used during the compilation process might be owned by a third party.

A crack does not compile anything, but even if you go that road, it will be argued anyway that the patch which is applied is copyrighted.

Now, of course, it's another thing to prove that the patch may indeed be copyrighted...

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#145

Post by szatkus »

tj-teej wrote: post #100

Related story, I remember years ago as a kid I bought a Prince of Persia PC game at a yardsale (on a CD), but early on in the game there was a riddle where you needed a password to get through this door, it was some cryptic message of a few numbers. I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game! I remember being so…

This was even more confusing for me, because the versions of those games I played were usually already cracked and accepted any input. So I was wondering what's the point.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#146

Post by PrimeMcFly »

paint wrote: post #140
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much room to misunderstand, and if he knows what cracked means what's going on should be obvious.

This seems like a weird hill to die on? yes it's obvious that rockstar (apparently) uploaded a cracked version of their game to steam. It's not obvious why they chose to do that (ie "what is going on")

I'm not dying on any hill, I think that's a weird comment to make, let alone to make an issue out of my original comment at all.

The way the comment was phrased read as though they didn't understand what had happened, not that they didn't understand why. Especially since no one has an answer to that, so no one can offer an explanation.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#147

Post by GuB-42 »

Maybe Rockstar has former, maybe even current members of Razor 1911 among their staff.

I mean, the scene is not a reliable way to pay the bills. You need to find a "real job" at some point, and the skills you get by cracking software and making demos could find good use in the video game industry.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#148

Post by paint »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #146
paint wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a weird hill to die on? yes it's obvious that rockstar (apparently) uploaded a cracked version of their game to steam. It's not obvious why they chose to do that (ie "what is going on")

I'm not dying on any hill, I think that's a weird comment to make, let alone to make an issue out of my original comment at all. The way the comment was phrased read as though they didn't understand what had happened, not that they didn't understand why. Especially since no one has an answer to that, so no one can offer an explanation.

[flagged]

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#149

Post by Bluecobra »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #93

Many years ago, I worked on a product that provided a bunch of old emulated games. We properly licensed them, but many of the license holders no longer had the original ROMs, ripping the game data off of some of the really old consoles was quite difficult, and the only ROMs available publicly were cracked copies with demo's added. That was the birth of the demoscene, which was awesome, but bad for us trying to legiti…

It would be kind of sad/funny if one of the games had a bad crack and the game itself was broken and not caught by QA. For example, Earthbound has one final check that would cause the game to freeze and delete your save at the final boss.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#150

Post by Moomoomoo309 »

fragmede wrote: post #137
rightbyte wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably unbuildable anyways without a lot of effort if you can't recreate the workstation that was building it.

These days you'd save a VM image, but if we all move off x86, what good will that do?

QEMU can run VMs that are a different architecture than the host. There's obviously a performance penalty to doing that, but it can be done.
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