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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

#231

Post by sznio »

monocasa wrote: post #130
threeio wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Razor1911 is a cracking group from the mid 80s on... but it would be fantastic wouldn't it? :)

At least some did. CD Projekt Red got started as a cracking and translation group. At the time (Poland before the fall of the iron curtain) there wasn't actually anything illegal about what they were doing; copyright wasn't really a concept in their legal system at the time, particularly for software.

> At the time (Poland before the fall of the iron curtain) there wasn't actually anything illegal about what they were doing; copyright wasn't really a concept in their legal system at the time, particularly for software.

They were successful because they actually stopped when it became illegal and started calling game publishers offering localization and distribution services.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#232

Post by danhor »

barbs wrote: post #157
monocasa wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember hearing that wrt roms on at least one of the NES|SNES|PS1 Classic systems.

Yeah same, although I think it was the ROMs distributed in the Wii Shopping Channel?

Nintendo used the same file format as used for pirated ROMs, so people assumed Nintendo simply used downloaded ROMs. As it turns out one of the people working at Nintendo for emulation previously worked on emulators outside Nintendo, so it's likely that just the file format was reused. The Nintendo leaks showed that Nintendo has extensive internal archives and the likelihood of them needing to download ROMs of the Internet is low.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#233

Post by capableweb »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #54
capableweb wrote: post #15

Why is this hex dump being used as a verification rather than just showing the two (supposedly the same) hashes of the entire executable themselves? Should be a quick 20 minute job for whoever call themselves "journalists" today. I suppose it's possible for that particular string to get into the binary by some other means. Maybe failed anti-circumvention that checks for known strings in its own directory or something…

First problem: You presume this person has another executable of provable provenance to check against. Second problem: There could be many different official executables for this game. Each would have a different hash. Provenance proving applies here too. Third problem: Two hash values doesn't communicate the actual story as well as what this person (who may or may not be a journalist, that appears to be your assumpt…

First solution: Yes, finding the PC CD for this game took me like 20 minutes, both new/old in even my country for something like 20 EUR. If the author wanted to, I'm sure they could have found it equally easy.

Second solution: Not really, when you do CD releases you have a "gold master" which is the final burned CD that the other CDs are copied from. That's the one you use as the official one, as that's the one most people on PC actually have.

If the game had multiple regions (something PC games usually don't), you have multiple executables. But this happens mostly for console games, but again wouldn't be difficult to acquire a specific one for one of the ~4/5 regions there is.

Re third problem, you're probably right about this. But I'd still argue that verifying information after a finding would add more credence to the story itself and cement it better, it wouldn't take anything away from the story (unless it proved that there isn't actually any story).

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#234

Post by capableweb »

wtallis wrote: post #21
capableweb wrote: post #15

Why is this hex dump being used as a verification rather than just showing the two (supposedly the same) hashes of the entire executable themselves? Should be a quick 20 minute job for whoever call themselves "journalists" today. I suppose it's possible for that particular string to get into the binary by some other means. Maybe failed anti-circumvention that checks for known strings in its own directory or something…

The location of the string is pretty telling: right after a 256 byte header, and occupying the first few bytes of a long run of zeroes. This isn't how you'd expect to find a constant embedded by a compiler or linker as part of code implementing a check for the presence of a crack.

That's a pretty good point actually.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#235

Post by incrudible »

pengaru wrote: post #197
incrudible wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reproducible builds and controlled toolchains are not really things you are going to realistically have, shipping games for Windows - even in 2023. That does not necessarily mean the final build is coming out of Mikes office PC, however.

You're taking what I said to mean a very pedantic definition of "reproducible builds" that even Linux distros largely only aspire to achieve. By reproducible I meant they can recreate their binaries from source code, not necessarily bit-for-bit. There's zero reason to ship a Warez group's cracked version of a game when you're the copyright holder in possession of the source and ability to simply build an executable w…

> a very pedantic definition of "reproducible builds"

That's not a pedantic definition, that is the definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds

> simply build an executable

One does not "simply" build an executable of a ten year old game codebase on a modern system. Of course it might be worth putting the build system - by which I literally mean the hardware and software - in storage. Realistically though, with all the churn happening in the games industry, studios getting closed/moved right after the game ships, it's often just not happening, especially if the game is not a big success.

> It's pathetic on Rockstar's part

It's actually exactly the kind of "fuck the police" attitude that I expect from the studio responsible for a game like GTA. Groups like Razor1911 also have their own ethics, they're doing a good job, creating a version of the game that is better than the one that actually shipped.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#236

Post by account42 »

ArnoVW wrote: post #89
Guvante wrote: post #81

Earlier 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.

NoCD patches are commonly distributed as an already-patched version of the executable, which would count as infringement.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#237

Post by monocasa »

danhor wrote: post #232
barbs wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah same, although I think it was the ROMs distributed in the Wii Shopping Channel?

Nintendo used the same file format as used for pirated ROMs, so people assumed Nintendo simply used downloaded ROMs. As it turns out one of the people working at Nintendo for emulation previously worked on emulators outside Nintendo, so it's likely that just the file format was reused. The Nintendo leaks showed that Nintendo has extensive internal archives and the likelihood of them needing to download ROMs of the In…

There was more than that.

> Apart from where mentioned above, filenames seem to match GoodSMS names (commonly found on the internet) with almost all non-alphabetical character removed. This suggests that all of the ROM images were obtained from the internet rather than from Sega's internal archives.

https://www.smspower.org/Development/NintendoWiiVirtualConso...

GoodSMS is a community/pirate naming scheme for identifying the different ROM dumps.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#238

Post by joveian »

Bluecobra wrote: post #149
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.

I think this was the case for one version of King's Bounty: The Legend on GOG (not the current version it sounds like?), which had a bug where you couldn't talk to an NPC at one point when you needed to do so to advance the game. At least, I recall someone mentioning somewhere when I looked after encountering the bug years ago that this was an issue of a random crack posted to the net that someone (the publisher I'm guessing, maybe GOG or the developer) had applied to produce the GOG version.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#239

Post by red-iron-pine »

darth_avocado wrote: post #175
chrisco255 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney lawyers, meanwhile, are looking to extend copyright to 50 years beyond the life of the author's 3rd generation descendant or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last.

The way things are going, the death of Disney may come quicker.

based on what? their stock is taking a hit but they're still a big, scary corp, and will probably win the fights with FL's a-hole governor.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#240

Post by BowBun »

nxobject wrote: post #159
BowBun wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been a consistent name in cracking since then!

I wonder if they're like the Bourbaki group in mathematics – an anonymous group where members elect other members, with a trivial amount of cloak-and-dagger secrecy from the public.

That's exactly so. Many of the groups know each other, have their private comm channels, and select insiders that release things out to the broader public. There's obviously drama around people leaking releases, stealing cracks, etc. Fun little sub-culture!
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