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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Whatever your opinions on DRM, I find the mindset of someone who would donate money to support cracking efforts to be... strange. Wouldn't it be easier to just buy the game?

I mean, it might be one thing if the cracker was also producing blog posts about their reverse engineering efforts and the internals of DRM, or if the audience was a bunch of Linux users... but in practice it seems to be a bunch of children (frankly) who want free stuff. I wonder who is donating?

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Well, from a certain mindset, a publisher that embeds drm in their game absolutely does not deserve your money (vote with your wallet and all of that).

Now, supporting someone cracking that same drm for people to run their games however they want? Makes much more sense.

Like many times before, just shows that piracy is not (just) about being cheap, it's (often) a matter of principle.

Moral opposition to the concept of DRM perhaps. For me in fact it's that DRM is such a massive pain in the ass that I usually buy the game and then pirate a copy that I can actually play without any storefront/UPlay/EPIC horseshit.

I actually do the same thing when a game isn't available without DRM, because I really dislike storefronts, but I get the strong impression we're a tiny minority among the people who use these cracks.

I dunno, I suppose a tiny minority is all you need, so maybe that's it...

There are lots of people who do the same.

Plus there's a huge number of people who go through a piracy 'phase'. Usually to get games when they're a teen with no cash. Most of the games they love are purchased once they've matured with a stable income.

Speaking from experience!

Poverty was also a major factor for a lot of us. Entertainment is a basic human necessity, and video games were so compelling to me as a child. When you have days where your mom has sleep for dinner so you don't, it's tough to find any money to spend on entertainment. I can see how it might seem like a better investment to chip in $10 to a cracker who will then release multiple games.

We were fortunate to benefit from a program meant to help get lower income families access to computers and the internet, in the early 2000's, so piracy opened up entertainment options far more diverse than the TV channels we could get over the air. On top of games, I remember burning music CD's for my friends and family. Hell, I remember long hours fiddling with the concept of transcoding and burning VCD's (basically a DVD, but on a CD) for my family to watch.

That basically what I went through, I acquired many pirated games when I was studying and trying to make ends meet, and I believe I bought all these classic games since.

And some DRMs like Denuvo are massive in size (add several hundreds megabytes to the executable) and resource intensive. It's quite common to see a significant performance gain and reduction in stuttering from the cracked version compared to the original version.

For this reason I tend to prefer buying my games from GOG, which sells all its games DRM-free.

I do value the work game developers put in these games and I buy all of them, but I like having the peace of mind that if something happens to my purchases down the road I could run a cracked executable later on.

> It's quite common to see a significant performance gain and reduction in stuttering from the cracked version compared to the original version.

It's quite common when a developer updates a game to remove Denuvo, or when an official Denuvo-free executable is accidentally leaked (as appears to be surprisingly typical), but I don't think it's that common for cracks.

Cracks generally do the absolute minimum to get a game to run, which often means leaving neutered but still performance-intensive DRM in place. Once a game works, I've never seen anyone take a second pass to improve performance. (Games that actually crash are of course a different matter.)

IMO, this is again an indicator of the scene's priorities.

The one reason I can guess is for the preservation effort. Copyright holder may go bankrupt and video games becomes orphaned works in any days. DRM is an obstacle for the software preservation effort.

I totally agree! I just don't quite believe that's the audience in this case.

If "EMPRESS" was hoping to get donations from preservationists, or Linux enthusiasts, she (?) would presumably be making a very different donation pitch.

But, who knows, maybe you're right and she just sucks at marketing. I don't have a better explanation!

When someone donate money to support cracking efforts they are not just buying the game (in an unusual way). Publicly available cracked software makes it accessible to thousands of other people who would not have enough money to access it otherwise.

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