PC PureDark (the person who adds DLSS & Frame Gen to games) is implementing DRM on their mods

[Spork3245]

 

They just added this to their RDR2 frame generation mod. Essentially there’s now a check to make sure you’re a Patreon subscriber.

I understand modders wanting to get paid for their work, but, Bethesda’s experimentation with “pay for mods” failed miserably for a reason. NexusMods allows donations to creators and it seems to work well.

[Bitgod]

He's dead to me.  Whoever he is.

[Mr.Vic20]

Step 1.) Add performance

Step 2.) Add something that will then damage that performance while pissing off your fans. 

Step 3.) Profit? 

[Spork3245]

Starfield Paid DLSS Mod Creator Hits Back at Pirates, Threatens to Add 'Hidden Mines' in Future Mods - IGN

WWW.IGN.COM

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In an interview with IGN, Starfield DLSS modder PureDark defends the decision to put his advanced DLSS mods on Patreon, and he plants his flag in the debate over paid mods.

 

Oh, hey, now he’s going to make his mods potentially malware. Good job!

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

17 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

Starfield Paid DLSS Mod Creator Hits Back at Pirates, Threatens to Add 'Hidden Mines' in Future Mods - IGN

WWW.IGN.COM

---

In an interview with IGN, Starfield DLSS modder PureDark defends the decision to put his advanced DLSS mods on Patreon, and he plants his flag in the debate over paid mods.

 

Oh, hey, now he’s going to make his mods potentially malware. Good job!

 

He's totally gonna add Denuvo to his mods next!

[CitizenVectron]

I am not opposed to mod creators asking for money...but $5 a month for a visual mod? That's the cost of the game itself after a single year, all for one small feature. lol, get real.

[Firewithin]

8 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

I am not opposed to mod creators asking for money...but $5 a month for a visual mod? That's the cost of the game itself after a single year, all for one small feature. lol, get real.

all for something Bethesda said they are going to be implementing themselves in a future update correct? 

[Jason]

2 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

He's totally gonna add Denuvo to his mods next!

 

Denuvo? Delolno.

[Keyser_Soze]

49 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

I am not opposed to mod creators asking for money...but $5 a month for a visual mod? That's the cost of the game itself after a single year, all for one small feature. lol, get real.

 

No continuous subscription needed.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

23 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

I am not opposed to mod creators asking for money...but $5 a month for a visual mod? That's the cost of the game itself after a single year, all for one small feature. lol, get real.

what Spork posted seems to imply you only need to have “donated” once. I don’t know if that’s once per game or once in your life. 
 

It’s like they’re antagonizing the modding community. Just baiting people to crack his mod DRM and find all the landmines. 
 

and all this from a guy that was supposedly already getting $40k a month in donations without the DRM. Unless that was just BS somebody made up to make PureDark look greedy. 

[stepee]

I wouldn’t call it malware really if it is only crashing itself. He’s just going to make it so if you pirate it, then it might not work and crash. I’m not a fan of it, but it’s not enough to make me not subscribe, and he hasn’t actually done it, so we will see.

 

I wish the community would just let it be honestly, it reminds me of stuff with the emulation community where they drive creators away. People who don’t want to pay for them should just not pay for them or use them and move on. I don’t see any issue with what he’s doing currently.

 

Im much more upset at the companies that aren’t paying someone themselves to add dlss3 support (or worse, taking money to not add it) than the independent worker asking users for money to add it in. 

[Spork3245]

4 hours ago, stepee said:

I wouldn’t call it malware really if it is only crashing itself.

By definition, that’s malware, especially since he made it sound like the entire game will crash or not work properly (not just the mod).  

 

4 hours ago, stepee said:

I wish the community would just let it be honestly

Very few people cared until he started adding DRM to mods, so the backlash is kinda on him, IMO.

 

4 hours ago, stepee said:

I don’t see any issue with what he’s doing currently.

There’s actually some bigger issues in the sense that he’s profiting off of the work of nVidia and Bethesda (and other devs) as his mods are based off and running on their code and hard work. It’s surprising he hasn’t gotten a cease & desist as others who’ve tried to charge for game mods in the past have, though theirs weren’t performance based mods (they were like fan made expansion packs or TCMs). It’s just really ridiculous to add DRM to these mods, and now to threaten to put “landmines” in the code too is just absolutely absurd (and I can’t wait for one of his subs to have an authentication issue and it bork their game). 

And this isn’t a “I jUsT wAnT iT fOr FrEe” thing as I have sources to get his (cracked) mods and am not using them, it just feels really crappy and lame when PC gaming has been built on a community of modding.

[stepee]

9 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

By definition, that’s malware, especially since he made it sound like the entire game will crash or not work properly (not just the mod).  

 

Very few people cared until he started adding DRM to mods, so the backlash is kinda on him, IMO.

 

There’s actually some bigger issues in the sense that he’s profiting off of the work of nVidia and Bethesda (and other devs) as his mods are based off and running on their code and hard work. It’s surprising he hasn’t gotten a cease & desist as others who’ve tried to charge for game mods in the past have, though theirs weren’t performance based mods (they were like fan made expansion packs or TCMs). It’s just really ridiculous to add DRM to these mods, and now to threaten to put “landmines” in the code too is just absolutely absurd (and I can’t wait for one of his subs to have an authentication issue and it bork their game). 

And this isn’t a “I jUsT wAnT iT fOr FrEe” thing as I have sources to get his (cracked) mods and am not using them, it just feels really crappy and lame when PC gaming has been built on a community of modding.

 

Idk, I think in general I don’t have an issue with individual people making money off a corporation as big as Microsoft. I think people should support and champion mods that are free, but if someone wants to do some work providing a service there is obviously demand for and receive some money for it, I struggle to find anything inherently wrong with it.

 

I realize I’m probably out of my element these days when discussing if something should be okay to have a cost or not though, so I won’t pontificate on it much.

 

It seems so easy to do (relatively) that I wonder if Nvidia could just release an auto plugin for reshade or something some day.

[Spork3245]

1 minute ago, stepee said:

 

Idk, I think in general I don’t have an issue with individual people making money off a corporation as big as Microsoft. I think people should support and champion mods that are free, but if someone wants to do some work providing a service there is obviously demand for and receive some money for it, I struggle to find anything inherently wrong with it.

The issue for 90% of people isn’t the payment, it’s the DRM, and now the threat of it crashing your game. 

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Spork3245 said:

The issue for 90% of people isn’t the payment, it’s the DRM, and now the threat of it crashing your game. 

 

Well they should just sign in and authenticate honestly because it’s easy

[Brian]

He is acting exactly as you expect of a person who is profiting off of someone else’s IP.  What a douche

[Spork3245]

17 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

Well they should just sign in and authenticate honestly because it’s easy

I can’t tell if you’re just being obstinate now so let’s just agree to disagree.  

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Spork3245 said:

I can’t tell if you’re just being obstinate now so let’s just agree to disagree.  

 

Its just I don’t care about the moral high ground with it, I just want him to keep making them on a purely selfish leve!

[Spork3245]

2 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

Its just I don’t care about the moral high ground with it, I just want him to keep making them on a purely selfish leve!

The thing is, while they’re better than nothing… they’re pretty janky. Just start a movement to get devs to implement it in every game or they face unspeakable consequences!

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Spork3245 said:

The thing is, while they’re better than nothing… they’re pretty janky. Just start a movement to get devs to implement it in every game or they face unspeakable consequences!

 

I don’t want to start it but i do keep waiting for that moment to arise! I definitely think amd’s comment allowing dlss in Starfield was due to the reaction online on it. Hopefully more will face similar backlash and start adding it to prevent that yeah.

 

But yeah it’s annoying dealing with them and keeping them updated when a new patch comes out etc but definitely better than not having it at all for now. I’m hoping next year dlss3 will be on most big releases though and we got hooked up with Alan Wake 2. I’m hoping he does a Mirage frame gen one though since that is Xess only.

[Spork3245]

2 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

I don’t want to start it but i do keep waiting for that moment to arise! I definitely think amd’s comment allowing dlss in Starfield was due to the reaction online on it. Hopefully more will face similar backlash and start adding it to prevent that yeah.

 

But yeah it’s annoying dealing with them and keeping them updated when a new patch comes out etc but definitely better than not having it at all for now. I’m hoping next year dlss3 will be on most big releases though and we got hooked up with Alan Wake 2. I’m hoping he does a Mirage frame gen one though since that is Xess only.

Like you previously mentioned, it’s surprising that nvidia doesn’t just do DLSS profiles in their drivers at this point. Frame Gen might be more complex, but DLSS Upscaling shouldn’t be too difficult (in terms of setting it on/off/quality-setting in the drivers like you can with forcing vsync or AA)

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

2 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

 

6 hours ago, stepee said:

I wish the community would just let it be honestly

Very few people cared until he started adding DRM to mods, so the backlash is kinda on him, IMO.

thats the part I don’t get. It just seems like a PR blunder. unless this is a game, and PureDark is throwing down a gauntlet to see if they can beat the best modders and crackers out there. Or maybe the notoriety is the point and the plan is to leverage this into a job/contract with a major developer.