In an ironic twist, Rockstar Video games reportedly makes use of pirated software program cracks to take away its DRM from some video games they promote on Steam.
Rockstar Video games and its mother or father firm, Take Two, are identified for taking a powerful stance towards devs who release game cheats and reverse engineer their games.
On account of this, it’s a bit shocking that the corporate is reportedly utilizing software program cracks created by the notorious Razor 1911 cracking group to take away DRM from software program titles offered on Steam.
BleepingComputer reached out to Rockstar Video games about their use of pirated software program cracks in their very own Steam video games however didn’t obtain a response.
This all got here to gentle after GTA content material creator Vadim M. shared a video final week on how Rockstar integrated a crack for its Manhunt and Max Payne 2 video games on Steam to bypass the built-in anti-piracy protections that they added within the first place.
The video led sport modder/reverse engineer Silent to wonder if Rockstar additionally carried out the identical technique to take away anti-piracy measures from different video games, reminiscent of Midnight Membership II, which is no longer sold on Steam.
After analyzing a Midnight Membership II sport executable, they found a testapp.exe executable distributed with the Steam sport that additionally utilized a Razor 1911 crack.
Supply: Silent
Silent defined that the usage of these cracks led to the identified points operating Manhunt and Midnight Membership II on Home windows Vista and later variations of Home windows.
“This will get higher – Razor’s crack is ok, the explanation each Midnight Membership 2 and Manhunt crashed when these cracks had been in use was the truth that Steam DRM included a .bind part that was code *not* marked as code – thus tripping Knowledge Execution Prevention,” defined Silent.
The irony was not misplaced on these behind the Razor 1911 X account, who posted, “*cough cough* First rule: Do not promote warez,” in response to Silent’s tweet.
Razor 1911 was a software program cracking group based in 1985 that rose to notoriety for creating cracks that allowed customers to bypass digital rights administration (DRM) protections and piracy safety techniques in video games. The group was additionally identified for his or her demos, generally distributed together with their sport cracks, that includes computer-generated graphics accompanied by music.
The cracking group disbanded round 2012 because the gaming trade shifted to cloud-based distribution and on-line providers.
Whereas we watch for a response from Rockstar Video games, you possibly can get pleasure from one among Razor 1911’s demos under.
