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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

#171

Post by lelandfe »

RajT88 wrote: post #87
echelon_musk wrote: post #22

This is more common than you might expect. The Windows port of Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents under Pressure being sold on Steam is the DEViANCE crack. Open the game's exe in a hex editor and you can plainly see "DEViANCE".

System sounds *.wav files were also produced with cracked software at some point (no clue if this is still in Win10): https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/windows-uses...

I'm impressed both that you had a nearly 20 year old link ready, and that this URL still works.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#172

Post by apgwoz »

enos_feedler wrote: post #151
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Razor could sue Rockstar for copyright infringement. That would be hilarious.

Former cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.

Oh, you "didn't" do this game, wink wink, nudge nudge. ;)

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#173

Post by pengaru »

incrudible wrote: post #124
pengaru wrote: post #83

Rockstar owns the copyright, they can do whatever they want with their games. It is rather odd however, and paints Rockstar in a very negative light as a trustworthy purveyor of binary distributed software. Do you want to receive l33t warez when paying for software? I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. Linux distributions have higher standards for binaries th…

> I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. I would estimate the number of videogames published for Windows PCs matching all of these critera to be roughly 0.

It's not like windows game developers are universally incompetent. They have their source so they can reproduce their binaries at will. They understand the risks of malware and how embarrassing it would be to unwittingly ship some, so they should know better than to be shipping releases built using their personal machine they also browse the web with.

For Rockstar to be shipping pirated cracked binaries as their own demonstrates a profound lack of responsibility and professionalism as software developers.

But I'm sure there's a non-zero amount of windows game developers being careless/sloppy in general too.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#174

Post by atherton33 »

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.

There was an example of this reposted here just last week: https://www.benshoof.org/blog/case-cracked

The crack for The Colonel's Bequest worked by hardcoding the RNG in the interpreter to always return the same number. This broke every random element of the game, which is undetectable on a single playthrough.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#175

Post by darth_avocado »

chrisco255 wrote: post #168
rpdillon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great example of how today's "piracy" is tomorrow's "only working copy left". I wish there were a more formal way to explicitly allow this, though I'm probably just pining for shorter copyright terms. This game was released 20 years ago, longer than the original U.S. copyright term of 14 years.

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.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#176

Post by bombcar »

freejazz wrote: post #91
wongarsu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A No-CD crack might not be transformative enough to warrant copyright protection as derivative work in the US. But they could sue in a jurisdiction that is more likely to give them a favorable outcome. Handling of derivative works and the minimum threshold for copyright varies considerably between countries.

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…

You can skirt incredibly close, however - search Amazon for “unofficial Harry Potter”.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#177

Post by michaelt »

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?

These days you'd save a VM image, in case you need to rebuild the code in 20 years.

Then in 20 years you boot up the image and find you can't log in because your cloud Windows account was deleted 10 years ago for inactivity, your build toolchain is too outdated to download artefacts, the vendor of your text-padding library deleted it in a fit of pique, your code-signing certificates have expired, the guy whose cell phone is on the corporate account 2FA left the company 15 years ago, the OS vendor won't allow new releases to use those obsolete, deprecated APIs.....

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#178

Post by 3abiton »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #41
robbiet480 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like Razor could sue Rockstar for copyright infringement. That would be hilarious.

I wonder if No-CD was released under a specific open-source license, that would be hilarious

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#180

Post by tetrisgm »

Honestly, it's fair game. I don't expect every studio to have the source code handy and someone who knows how to build and modify the game anymore. If the crack does the job, I can empathize.

Inversely, it's not like the crack was made just out of educational curiosity. At one point it might have hurt sales... now somehow it helps.

Not like the group would have a moral high ground to claim their copyright was violated. Though the idea is fun.

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