What does it prove and how? It just seems like they are being lazy.

Feels like there should be class action lawsuits for the people who purchased what they thought were legit copies of the game.

This means they somewhat approve of the crack in the game in that fashion

No it doesn't lol

It's like how the "You wouldn't download a car" video has pirated music in it.

This isn't really news. It's likely a result of a cost benefit analysis combined with c-suite direction. It's really not that big of a deal at all. It's like Nintendo being criticised. What a colossal waste of energy to care.

Also reminds me of the time Microsoft was using a cracked version of SoundForge to make system sounds:

http://www.techpavan.com/2009/05/24/microsoft-deepz0ne-pirated-cracked-sound-forge-windows-xp-audio/

IIRC it didn’t end with the wiishop either. Off the top of my head, there was some controversy surrounding the NES/SNES Classic consoles. I think they used emulators that were written by pirates, instead of writing their own?

Rockstar grabbed the crack made by Razor 1911 and put it on the Steam version of Midnight Club 2 instead of taking out the DRM themselves.

To play a game without buying it need to be cracked, or in other words the security in place needs to be hacked. In the olden days you would borrow your friends game of a copy and place a no-cd hack on it, so that you could use it. With online security this was more difficult and people had to make a new crack to let the drm think is was connect to the server and all was oké. Most companies bought DRM software from third party developers that got implemented into the games gold release (the version that goes on ace or store). To remove this DRM cost time because the game and assets need to be recompiled without this DRM system, most of the time even braking some checks.

So as a solution here and not spending time on development time, to just a piece of software from a “pirate” group. Although most of the time the group who made the crack never distributed the game as a torrent, some third party groups made bundle torrents where at one go you had the game and crack.

Historically, games would refuse to boot unless you had the game disc inserted. Even if the game was fully installed and didn’t need the disc to run, requiring the disc was a primitive form of DRM.

One of the most common forms of cracks was a NoDisc crack, which did exactly what it says on the label; It removed the requirement for you to insert a disc. This was usually just a quick file replacement. So it was easy to take the game disc to your buddy’s house, use it to install the game on their computer, apply the NoDisc crack, and then your buddy could play the game whenever they wanted without using your disc. This was many people’s first intro to piracy. Obviously game publishers hated this, and constantly played whack-a-mole to shut them down. On the data preservation and user friendliness side of things, NoDisc cracks were popular because they allowed you to play your games without digging through your giant book of CD’s. It also meant you weren’t locked out of a game just because your little sibling scratched your CD.

When transitioning to digital sales, the disc requirement obviously won’t work. You can’t require a disc when the user never actually received a disc. So the game publishers had to remove the disc requirement when they put their game up for sale on Steam. And this is showing that in the official Steam release, a pirate’s signature is found. They simply used a NoDisc crack (from one of the crackers that they had constantly been battling) on their own game, to remove the disc requirement. Instead of finding an “official” way to do it, they just used the most straightforward route.

And yet game publishers still constantly harp about piracy.

Too lazy to remove old DRM, so they just use a pirated .exe file.

Definitely rockstar indeed manhunt, another of their games, has the same razor hex sign in the game files, and I'm pretty much sure rockstar did this, because manhunt is unplayable on steam because all the antipiracy measure in it are trigghered, and the funny thing is that is not happening because of the crack but because rockstart added the steam drm in a non code section of the game that trip a Data Execution Prevention.

Valve won't touch game files, way too much liability and not nearly enough incentive given the money machine that steam is. This one is definitely Rockstar, and I'm betting they just don't have the capability of compiling the pc version anymore.

Valve just manages the storefront, and provides a OS/libraries to improve capability on Linux OS with proton.