Company releases cracked version of their game rather than recompile it

[mouser]

This is hilllarious..

..Jamie noticed a fairly amazing little story about Rockstar shipping a version of Max Payne 2 via Steam that was actually cracked by pirates to remove the DRM. The going theory was that it was easier for them to simply use the pirate group's crack than to actually remove their DRM themselves.

[mwb1100]

So can the 'pirate' issue some sort of copyright violation takedown order? 

[Lashiec]

If the group still was around, I suppose so

But really, this shows the hypocrisy surrounding game companies, DRM'ing the hell out of games, making things harder to honest gamers, and downplaying the gravity of the matter, while later finding out the same DRM they promoted as a Good Thing is also a pain in the ass for them for various reasons: lack of knowledge on how to decouple the DRM protection from the game, not having access to the source code, or just sheer laziness and the burning desire of making a quick buck. The case of Max Payne 2 is even more egregious, as Rockstar substituted one DRM system for another. Being a 2003 game, you could go and make the game entirely DRM free, eh? But noooo.

I guess we'll keep seeing more cases like this as digital services add more and more old games for which a crack is easily obtainable to their catalogue. Max Payne 2 is the third case this year, the previous ones being Arcanum and FlatOut, sold by GOG, which at least they're entirely DRM-free.

[Stoic Joker]

So software cracks are now only to be considered dangerous most of the time...?

[Deozaan]

So can the 'pirate' issue some sort of copyright violation takedown order? 

You make a good point. Isn't what they did breaking some sort of anti-reverse engineer/copy-protection-avoiding laws?

[lanux128]

this is becoming more prevalent as publishers try to make money on their older titles. as the original dev team might not be around, they're becoming more reliant on these 'cracked' versions. even gog.com which sells DRM-free older games was supplied with such an exe recently (Arcanum), so that it becomes "DRM free". another major publisher found using them was Ubisoft, for one of the Rainbow 6 games, iirc.

[Innuendo]

I think the lesson I'm taking away from this scenario is that these game companies endorse & readily embrace the use of cracked/hacked/reverse-engineered executables on their games & therefore I shall use them with impunity and no guilt regarding their products.

I do wonder if there were ever a court case and such information were entered into evidence if a judge would share my views.