It’s nice to see gaming companies finally figuring out what users have known since the 90s.
Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
221–230 of 259 posts
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#222I think Razor should sue Rockstar for IP violation, Razor obviously owns the IP to unprotect the binary ;)
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Question for you from the 17 year old me. Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge? I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
It’s a great way to learn - so challenge. There’s neither fame nor money here I think. At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around. Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figur…
Exactly true. Was a teenage software hacker, reverse engineered many games mostly because I was a bored teenager with free time and many games I legitimately bought. Mostly it was to cheat a little, like tweaking player stats or number of lives in a save file.
All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost like magic.
Solid experience with reverse engineering really is a good skill to have.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#224Could we get some more context than this tweet (which doesn't really explain what's going on)?
I think that if you had a twitter account you could click on something and see more context.
Linking twitter has become worse than your average paywalled site, which you can look up on archive.something if it seems interesting.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#225Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a great way to learn - so challenge. There’s neither fame nor money here I think. At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around. Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figur…
Exactly true. Was a teenage software hacker, reverse engineered many games mostly because I was a bored teenager with free time and many games I legitimately bought. Mostly it was to cheat a little, like tweaking player stats or number of lives in a save file. All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost…
Depends on when the people did this and how complex the mechanism were at the time. I do remember just learning about JMP in assembler and that you could bypass a lot of stuff by changing a true to false or vice versa. Not exactly rocket science. (Not saying this to downplay anything, but what seems magical to many non-techies was actually very easy to do if you knew the trick, and it already worked for like 30% of the games - I'm not talking about the real stuff later on, not even sure how complicated NoCD was.)
On the other hand, probably 15-20 years after I had last used a crack for a game I had to implement some basic protection like this into a piece of software (more like: make sure the customer will not run this demo version forever) and it was fun to discuss in the team what we all remembered from back then and which measures were adequate to implement.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likely Rockstar would counter sue for violating their original Copyright and the terms of use attached to them. At best it would be a wash, there is a decent chance the damages for the countersuit would lead to a net loss.
The can sue them for anti-circumvention statutes in the DMCA. But not for infringement, since the developers did not do the infringement, they only enabled it.
Do those statutes apply for interoperability? Which takes precedence?
This is basically how Rockstar used it - to make the game work on computers without CDs. So the actual rights holder has recognised that this tool or one like it is legitimately required for interoperability, between the game as a piece of technology and a modern computer. They won't work together otherwise.
Maybe I am being too tricky but that's how I see it. And if that makes it a legitimate work then it's funny to think about the consequences.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
The can sue them for anti-circumvention statutes in the DMCA. But not for infringement, since the developers did not do the infringement, they only enabled it.
Do those statutes apply for interoperability? Which takes precedence? This is basically how Rockstar used it - to make the game work on computers without CDs. So the actual rights holder has recognised that this tool or one like it is legitimately required for interoperability, between the game as a piece of technology and a modern computer. They won't work together otherwise. Maybe I am being too tricky but that's h…
Certain excemptions are provided in the DMCA, and have been established via jurisprudenence:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
Geeks often think that the law is some sort of blockchain-esque thing that is absolute, context-free and machine-interpretable.
In reality, many laws require 'guilty intent' (mens rea). This is why we have 'judges', who perform 'judgement'.
So the same tool called 'no-cd', marketed as a backup tool may be judged 'OK', where 'WaR3z HaCk.exe' published by a group of known software pirates will be judged 'anti circumvention'
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#229Could we get some more context than this tweet (which doesn't really explain what's going on)?
The game shown here, Midnight Club II, required the CD to be in the drive to play it. With the advent of Steam and companies releasing older games on Steam, they needed a way to bypass that check. Bypassing a CD (commonly called No-CD) was a very common crack/DRM bypass back in the day. Rockstar didn't want to bring up old source code and find someone who understood it enough to remove the check, so instead they just…
One game I really loved as a kid, sim coaster, has a nocd crack floating around, sadly it blocks some needed features further into the game.
And I can't find any non-crack iso to load into the VM. (Can't rip it myself, due to not having a cd drive anymore)
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#230Does this mean, then, that their integration to Steamworks or whatever client-ensuring integration... is missing? One could presumably then archive the directory and go DRM-free
> One could presumably then archive the directory and go DRM-free
Bypassing Steam DRM requires just replacing a single DLL in the game directory. There's even whole full-featured Steam Emulator DLLs that you just drop in and get to play the game for free with working online play over Valve's servers.