Rockstar Pulls 'Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Edition' After Unintentionally Including Files (pcgamer.com) 33
Shortly after Thursday's release of Grand Theft Auto: The Definitive Edition, the Rockstar Games Launcher on PC went down, leaving most Rockstar titles unplayable, reports PC Gamer.
They also identified possible issues explaining why: Firstly, the Trilogy has shipped with internal developer comments visible on the code, such as... "This shit doesn't work the way they wrote it below so we'll just show the text and place the blip at the beginning of the mission...."
Coders leaving funny comments is one thing: even if you might not want the public to see it, who really cares. However some dataminers have found that Vice City and San Andreas may have shipped with songs that have technically been 'removed' from the game because the licenses have expired... The presence of unlicensed music could in theory be a big headache for Rockstar. While the music may not be accessible to the average user, it is in the product's files and can be accessed using certain tools. And, oh yeah, without the appropriate license.
One dataminer told the site that the audio codec used in these games is the open source OGG-VORBIS, and for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, "EVERY song is there." And then Thursday the official Twitter feed for Rockstar Support announced their Games Launcher was "temporarily offline for maintenance." PC Gamer reported it remained down for more than 16 hours.
Friday night Rockstar Support announced their Launcher was now back online — but that GTA: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition "is unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions.
"We're sorry for the disruption and hope to have correct ones up soon."
They also identified possible issues explaining why: Firstly, the Trilogy has shipped with internal developer comments visible on the code, such as... "This shit doesn't work the way they wrote it below so we'll just show the text and place the blip at the beginning of the mission...."
Coders leaving funny comments is one thing: even if you might not want the public to see it, who really cares. However some dataminers have found that Vice City and San Andreas may have shipped with songs that have technically been 'removed' from the game because the licenses have expired... The presence of unlicensed music could in theory be a big headache for Rockstar. While the music may not be accessible to the average user, it is in the product's files and can be accessed using certain tools. And, oh yeah, without the appropriate license.
One dataminer told the site that the audio codec used in these games is the open source OGG-VORBIS, and for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, "EVERY song is there." And then Thursday the official Twitter feed for Rockstar Support announced their Games Launcher was "temporarily offline for maintenance." PC Gamer reported it remained down for more than 16 hours.
Friday night Rockstar Support announced their Launcher was now back online — but that GTA: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition "is unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions.
"We're sorry for the disruption and hope to have correct ones up soon."
Because LICENSING (Score:4, Funny)
Think of the children!”
Music Piracy!”
Thou shalt not see dev comments!”
Three out of ten modern commandments broken, right there. /sarcasm
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Is there a modern commandment against Easter Eggs? Doesn't the hot coffee thing count as an egg?
Asking for a friend, of course. I prefer ice coffee.
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Also because it's buggy crap. The games were released unfinished with severe bugs. There graphics are messed up quite badly. You get nonsense like it raining indoors and infinite view distance, and that's on top of the bugs in the original games.
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Think of the children!”
Music Piracy!”
Thou shalt not see dev comments!”
Three out of ten modern commandments broken, right there. /sarcasm
Just remember, when an open source license is not followed, it's a travesty [slashdot.org]. When a closed source license is not followed, it's a victory over the proletariat.
If you think it's acceptable to not care about one license, you can't care about the other.
Getting a warm fuzzy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Getting a warm fuzzy? (Score:3)
Re: Getting a warm fuzzy? (Score:2)
I just think of it as being part of the control/punishment BDSM scene..
"I've been bad Micro$oft! Lock up all my files and spank me hard!"
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I refuse to buy any game on Steam that has a 3rd-party EULA, let alone 3rd-party DRM. Thankfully, there's still plenty of indie developers that satisfy my requirement. AAA developers can buzz off.
All they need now... (Score:1)
...is a scandal about long-running sexual misconduct towards women and a toxic work culture and they can be just like Blizzard!!
Rumor has it... (Score:3)
...that in addition to dev comments and unlicensed songs, the Hot Coffee mod was included in the remastered game, too. [forbes.com]
So (Score:5, Funny)
Grand Theft Audio?
Game licensing (Score:3)
So many games die out due to "expired licenses".
In game music is the obvious one.
Another is ads. Yes games like Resident Evil 2 or Alan Wake had those, and needed to be removed / replaced for the "remakes"
And the worst kind: movie licenses. Many relatively good movie tie in die out. Terminator, James Bond, Marvel to name a few. Classics cannot even be re-released with back compat on modern platforms since the publisher no longer has the rights to the name.
Solution? The game content licenses should be perpetual. If I buy a Marvel vs Capcom game on my PSP, I should be able to play it on my PS Vita. If I had a Terminator game in Xbox 360, it should still play on Series X. (Except for legitimate technical issues).
Thanks to all "live service" games and online content, even boxed games will stop working in the future. Which will be even worse for game archival.
Re:Game licensing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Game licensing (Score:2)
Not really.
Movies that air on TV occasionally have scenes removed or product placements blurred out.
TV shows air once with licenses for one airing and syndication and streaming/dvd release negotiations are a pain in the ass.
Especially so for stuff that aired before the mid 2000s when rights weren't negotiated to include streaming and dvd releases.
Daria on MTV is a famously infamous case where it was the soundtrack licensing that kept it out of the stores until fairly late and even then it was released with
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They also sometimes change product placements depending on region. I once saw Demolition Man in France, and instead of Taco Bell being the company to win the franchise wars like in the US release it was Pizza Hut.
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Haha, I only know it with Pizza Hut. Makes sense from the story's perspective though. We don't have Taco Bell in Europe.
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Imagine buying a new copy of the movie Cinderella, but the music license on "Bippity-boppity-bo" has expired so its been replaced. Why in the hell are they allowed to unbake the cake in games but movie licenses appear to be perpetual?
It happens. In the DVD set for Charmed, the eighth season has different opening credit music. And in the DVD set for Roswell, they replaced a *lot* of music for licensing reasons.
Music licensing is a constant pain in the backside, and the biggest reason for that is because copyright is so bloody perpetual. If copyright were as it was originally intended, we'd have huge libraries of public domain music that folks could use. Companies would license newer stuff some of the time, but they'd also take advant
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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> The game content licenses should be perpetual.
Nope. Game SALES SHOULD BE FINAL.
If you ship an 'online' game, then when you turn off your servers you should be legally obligated to release the code and a patch for clients to connect to private servers.
And once you place something on someone's computer, you should NEVER have the right to just claw it back. If you shipped something you later lost the license to, that's now between you and the license owner. Get sued.
Re: Game licensing (Score:2)
The other solution is to slightly modify the skins/models and now we have "The Stupendous Arachnid Guy!"
Too bad it does not fix the general suckosphere run by suits which is modern gaming. Yeah, we get the arcade experience in the home now, complete with constantly feeding in quarters to play.
The more interesting story (Score:4, Interesting)
They can very obviously turn your game on and off as they please. So if they at some point in the future decide that you shouldn't play that game anymore that you paid for...
this has been the case for decade now (Score:2)
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Steam can turn my game off? Well, first of all, all the games I have off Steam don't require me to go online (yes, I avoid games that require that), so as long as I have them on my HD already, I can play them. Even if Steam at some point in time makes that game unavailable, something that has never happened to me before, even with games they don't sell on their platform anymore for whatever reason. You can still download and install them, even gifts of that games still work in case you have gift issues of t
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> something that has never happened to me before
Every day the turkey welcomes the farmer with glee, for he brings him food. On the night before thanksgiving, that trust gets broken...
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You sound like the religious nuts who tell me that god will be really, really angry with me after I die.
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I'm really not though...
I simply don't trust any software which requires a random remote service to be functional to function. The fact that "it has never not worked in the past" is a non-argument for me, and was only trying to make that case.
Now that you point it out though, I might sign off comments like this with something like "Book of Steam 2:404"
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You can easily circumvent this with Steam. Download it after buying, create a backup, install from there. It's as good as an install-DVD.
What you need to avoid is games that require a "validation" server every time you start them. But that's the same for Steam or physical media: Avoid always-on games.
gave them what they paid for (Score:3)
We inadvertently gave customers what they paid for and so we shut it all down.
Oh, that explains it (Score:2)
'One dataminer told the site that the audio codec used in these games is the open source OGG-VORBIS, and for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, "EVERY song is there."'
EVERY song? Okay, I was wondering about the 546 petabyte download size...