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.
…
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.”
I don’t understand how this works. Won’t be the paid users affected by it too? How does the program/mod knows when it got hacked, so it won’t annoy paid customers?
This is a very succinct summary of DRM. You can’t implement any kind of DRM or anti-piracy measure without directly harming your desired audience.
In fact, it actively encourages people to “hack” it just so they can make a version with the annoyances removed.
It has to implement a call home to check if you paid for the mod or not. This requires either an activation code or a login that is hard to keep secure. I think this is not the way to do this. Instead, he should have waited for the creator workshop or whatever was tried by bethesda before and then release the mod.