Rockstar Gives Piracy Advocates More Ammo For Pro-Piracy
Jakob Aylesbury / 1 year ago
Rockstar Games has today been caught in a bit of a blunder in regards to piracy as they’ve been caught selling a cracked copy of Midnight Club 2 on Steam.
Rockstar Selling Cracked Copies of Midnight Club 2
As shared by dsogaming.com, a modder by the name of Silent has shared on Twitter that the Steam Version of Midnight Club 2 is actually a cracked version of the game. Within the internal codes of the game the name “RAZOR 1911” is spotted which was a piracy group that cracked the game all the way back in 2003. What this means is that Rockstar has been selling a cracked version of Midnight Club 2 on Steam rather than their own original files.
Accidentally Providing A Positive For Piracy
Piracy isn’t a good thing for game developers however this reveal can be taken as a positive outlook on piracy. Recently a study was conducted that found 87% of games have been lost to time being inaccessible through legal storefronts. The fact that Rockstar has used a cracked copy of the game sort of proves that Piracy is one of the few ways to prevent many games from being lost despite its illegality. There are many games which you can’t buy with the only option being to pirate the game, one example is TDU 2 which isn’t available on PC and on CDKey sites it costs £100+ which is not worth it no matter how good the game is. There are probably countless games that aren’t available to buy on Steam or other storefronts but can be found, if you look hard enough, on shady sites for cracked games.
I’m not sure why Rockstar chose to use the copy but it is suspected that it may have been due to laziness surrounding the DRM on the game.