The creator of the paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation mod, PureDark, has said that he will be placing “hidden mines” in his future mods.
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In an interview with IGN, ‘PureDark’ has now commented on his mod being cracked, and has said that future “hidden” mines will cause future mods to sometimes work, fail, crash, and whatnot.
“It was expected since it was something I put together within a day or two, but I did get enough patrons so it’s done its job”, the modder told IGN. “So from now on I will place hidden mines in all my mods to make it harder for these people. They might be able to find and bypass some of them, but they will never know if they have found all of them. The cracked mods will sometimes work, sometimes fail, sometimes work but [be] very wonky, sometimes even crash and they won’t even know if it’s a bug or just them using the cracked version, and they will never have the support I’ve been always providing to my subscribers.”
putting aside the ethics of DRM in general (ew) and that this developer has already made a fortune on a mod virtually unequaled… my biggest problem with this kind of thing is that bugs happen. “mines” implies that the goal will be to do something malicious to pirates. so what happens when there’s a bug in the detection code, or in the auth server, or when you didn’t test it on some specific quirky hardware-software combo, or when a cosmic ray strikes the RAM stick and flips the wrong bit?
a paying customer gets fucked – or a lot of them do. all for the petty greed of someone who can’t envision the obvious fact that the actual pirates will just fuzz your bomb logic and patch it out within two days.
As Gabe Newell believes, piracy is ultimately a service problem - when games are easier to pirate than buy them, people will pirate them.
As a formerly hardcore, now infrequent pirate, I wholeheartedly agree with this.
I’ve even pirated ANSYS at one point because the cracked version was a lot more reliable than the version I had for free, due to shoddy DRM (FlexLM, what a garbage licence management).