After 15 years, GTA dev's anti-piracy measures are still only hurting legitimate players

gamesradar.com:

In 2008, Rockstar brought its full line-up of PC games to Steam, and players quickly discovered that several of those titles were distributed with illegal cracks made by pirate groups. 15 years later, that fact is still having unintended consequences for legitimate players of the GTA dev's classics.

If you were a PC gaming fan back in 2010, you might recall that players discovered the logo for the piracy group Myth buried inside the executable file for the official Steam release of Max Payne 2, suggesting that Rockstar simply downloaded a pirated version of the game for the Steam launch instead of manually replacing the original disc-based DRM system. The discovery quickly went viral, and within days, Rockstar replaced the cracked executable with a 'clean' version - though the pirated exe was still in the game folder, simply renamed as 'testapp.'

It turned out that Max Payne 2 wasn't the only game Rockstar brought to Steam with an executable cracked by a piracy group. The exe file for Manhunt originally released on Steam with a signature from a piracy outfit called Razer 1911. When the Max Payne 2 crack was unearthed, the publisher also quickly replaced the cracked Manhunt exe with a fresh version free from any pirate fingerprints.

But, as a recent video from YouTuber Vadim M demonstrates, the Manhunt exe swap had quite a few more unintended consequences. The PC version of Manhunt actually has multiple layers of digital rights management, or DRM. Since the game was originally released before digital distribution became the norm on PC, the first layer is a simple disc check through a technology called SecuROM. 

The second DRM layer is where things get interesting for Manhunt. If the game discovers that the code for the