There's a never-ending debate surrounding the concept of piracy of intellectual content.
I will say that it's wrong to steal; but I will also say that most of the companies that scream the loudest about it bring it upon themselves thanks to their own business practices.
But once in a while, a company does something so outlandishly stupid that it just cries out for someone to mock them.
I'm here for that; and I'm looking at you, Rockstar Games.
Rockstar Games has been the subject of controversy many times over, after producing such games as the Grand Theft Auto series, Bully, the Max Payne series, the now-infamous "Hot Coffee" mod, that game where you riot in a shopping mall...
Hmmm... What was it I just heard about Max Payne?
Oh, right, they're going to distribute it over the internet so more people can play their games, right on.
Now, the thing about this is that the distribution system they're using - a game-delivery system called Steam, created by Valve Software, the people who made Half-Life and Left 4 Dead - doesn't like the DRM the Rockstar people used in Max Payne 2.
No problem! They can simply recompile their game's code to leave out the DRM, and then they're in like Flynn.
That's Easy!
But not easy enough for Rockstar.
...Back up a bit.
In the online piracy "scene," if there can be considered such a thing, there exist shadowy groups of software crackers, whose entire purpose is to provide copies of popular games which have been reverse-engineered to remove the copy protection. A kind of running competition exists; the cracker groups give themselves names, and work to be the first group to "release" a new game, gaining reputation and whatever else it is that crackers get from their successes.
One such group was Myth, which cracked several major, high-profile titles in the early 2000's, and continued to operate despite multiple attempts by the FBI and other agencies to find them and shut them down.
One of those titles was...
...Drumroll, please...
...Max Payne 2.
So imagine my surprise when I read the news that Rockstar Games had released Max Payne 2 onto the Steam distribution system, DRM-free...
They didn't recompile the code; they didn't even bother to remove Myth's logo from the operating code, included as an ASCII-art "comment."
...I will note that this is for RETAIL, now; they're SELLING copies of the game that contain code generated by a bunch of bleary-eyed kids in their mom's basements.
Right.
We hate piracy, yo!
...Except when the pirates save us time and money, then we're fine with it.
Kinda makes that "pirates contribute nothing" argument ring a tad hollow, doesn't it?
