It’s a shame: Rockstar was caught red-handed selling cracked versions of its own games on Steam to circumvent its own anti-piracy protections.
Source: ToxicMaxi
As we know, Rockstar isn’t the best student when it comes to preserving the old glory of its catalog. And when it comes to updating its classics like Red Dead Redemption or GTA, the studio seems to be following the bare minimum strategy.
Worse still, the studio reportedly has a habit of selling pirated copies of its games to circumvent its own anti-piracy measures. The problem: Legally sold games become unusable for players.
When Rockstar shoots itself in the foot
Vadim M, a content creator specializing in the GTA series, tells the story in a YouTube video about Manhunt, an old game from the studio. The Steam version of the title, released in 2008, quickly became unplayable for many players, leaving them facing locked doors, falling through the floor, or simply seeing their game crash unexpectedly.
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I accept everything
The reason: Rockstar would have maintained anti-piracy measures in the game and punished players who bought it on Steam. These measures did not affect players who downloaded the game illegally. So why were they active for players who wanted to stay legal? Because the studio simply sold the cracked version of the game without removing the DRM protection.
The most astute observers have thus discovered the signature of the pirate group Razor 1911 in the executable file in the root folder of the title. The same signature was found in the files of Max Payne 2 and this week on X (Twitter) in Midnight Club II, which also had many bugs, certainly less blocking than Manhunt’s. When Rockstar was discovered, it rushed to update the version of the game by replacing the executable file with the original and leaving the cracked version in the folder under a different name. Moon.
The signature of the Razor 1911 warez group, found in the Midnight Club II executable file // Source: @__quiet_
A not so isolated practice
The use of copy and piracy protection in video games has always been controversial. DRM like Denuvo has a reputation for hindering game performance: we remember Resident Evil Village, whose framerate issues were fixed after the game was cracked. Very often studios withdraw this type of protection several weeks or months after the game’s release due to sometimes massive player dissatisfaction. The most recent example is Forspoken, which benefited greatly from Denuvo’s withdrawal last July.
But just like Rockstar, other studios don’t hesitate to offer cracked versions of their games in online stores. Ubisoft was caught red-handed in 2008 for offering a so-called “no-CD” crack patch for the game Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, allowing players who had purchased the game to play it. The practice also affects the emulation world of the manufacturers themselves: Nintendo and Sega are regularly accused of selling illegal ROMs from their catalog on their consoles.
While this trend obviously cannot be generalized, it seems that the work of the Pirates sometimes benefits the players.
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