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.”
While mod authors are free to charge money for their mods, including DRM in a mod for a game that doesn’t have DRM (beyond basic steam account check) is kinda messed up. Adding deliberate bugs to mess with pirates is even more messed up. Why waste time making your product worst with drm and intentional bugs just to piss pirates who would never buy your product in the first place anyway?
They’ll quickly learn that messing with pirates is a great idea if you want to be trolled to oblivion. Or doxxed.
Garry’s mod did it the other way around, they doxed the more naive pirates. Sadly it was mostly celebrated.
It’s actually a really old practice, “the first DRM”. You’d place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you’d pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the “die if you didn’t have the manual”, but those let you go on … just knowing you’d lose every single time.