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 guardian firm, Take Two, are identified for taking a powerful stance towards devs who launch recreation cheats and reverse engineer their video games.

As a consequence 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 bought 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 included 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 recreation modder/reverse engineer Silent to surprise if Rockstar additionally carried out the identical technique to take away anti-piracy measures from different video games, resembling Midnight Membership II, which is not bought on Steam.

After analyzing a Midnight Membership II recreation executable, they discovered a testapp.exe executable distributed with the Steam recreation that additionally utilized a Razor 1911 crack.

Silent defined that using 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 rationale 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 Information 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 recreation 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 companies.

Whereas we look forward to a response from Rockstar Video games, you possibly can get pleasure from certainly one of Razor 1911’s demos under.