this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I love the implication here, that they don't have the proper source (or skills left in the company) such that they can remove the DRM which doesn't play nice themselves so they rely on a cracked copy of the game instead. Been quite a bit of news lately about how game companies have failed to keep the original source code for their games. Diablo 2, the Transformers games etc and those from active companies, there's bound to be 1000s of games where the source is lost due to publishers closing down studios.
Logical next step, hacker sues the developer for copyright infringement?
I mean, they didn't even bother to remove the signature!
The crack might not actually be protected by copyright, unless there's substantial new code added.
It's a complete crapshow IMO.
I still have the source code for the simple stuff I developed over 12 years ago, but these organisations don't think it's important to hang on to source code and assets for something they plan to make money from?
Really telling about the attitudes towards software outside of the FOSS space and datahoarder communities, and more importantly how little the management/publishers actually care about the product.
Although to counter that, I'm aware of at least one situation where the opposite has happened. One of my simulation games for example is really buggy and isn't able to receive more updates because the studio behind it voluntarily disbanded, leaving the publisher without access to the source code (I believe the publisher Aerosoft has tried to get a copy of the source to provide further game fixes, but the individuals behind the disbanded studio could not come to an agreement on this)
I've had teams not bother to keep proper history when moving from subversion to git and I've also had a DevOps team entirely wipe the history of a new project just because cloning took a long time (and refused to attempt shallow cloning).
So the idea that a company just lets their code "rot" to the point of not even having it anymore because it's just some legacy thing from over a decade ago is totally unsurprising to me.
Just to pile on. I've seen devs throw out the entire git history when moving between repos for ongoing projects.
Even if they have the source, they may not have all the build tools anymore.
Or they have the build tools but the wizard that set up the build system back in the day no longer works there.
Or they have the build system archived and documented but it doesn't run because some license expired, and the tool vender doesn't sell that version anymore.
In the near future, there will be another possibility - SaaS cloud tools that are impossible to preserve so they are forever lost.
Very true, and even if they could replace/remove libraries and dependencies that muck up the build process there are no guarantees that it'll play the same. So many games rely on strange quirks to function the way they do that would be nigh impossible to replicate purposely.
I'd say they probably still have the source. It looks like they did the same thing for Manhunt and Max Payne, but then pulled older, pre-SecuROM exes from their archives when they got busted.
I don't know about Diablo 2, but Blizzard is so shady and messed up nowadays that I wouldn't be surprised that they "lost the source code" to prevent modders being able to port games, etc.
As for transformers, it was never lost (PCGamer, if you don't like Xfire). Hasbro claimed they wanted to provide access to legacy games, but completely made up that the source was lost. Now that we know that the source is still available... well, Hasbro clearly hasn't tried to rerelease those games.
(note: I know this is the same company, Activision Blizzard in both cases. For anyone reading who doesn't know, they were not the same company for the release of Diablo II, and a good amount of time afterwards.)