Game pirates have been rejoicing of late over the quick cracking and re-cracking of games protected with Denuvo, which was once considered the unbreakable best-in-class piracy protection on the market. Now, some of those pirates are angry that a popular mod re-enables piracy checks for one of those cracked games.

The FAR mod (for Fix Automata Resolution) smooths out Nier Automata's wonky resolution upscaling on HD monitors and also unlocks and improves frame rates via graphical optimizations. It also adds "a license that requires a simple SteamAPI validity check," as mod author Kaldaien writes on NeoGAF. "Nothing malicious happens if you fail this check, you're just presented with an infinite license screen that you can click Accept on but since you don't respect licenses the license doesn't respect your click."

Though Kaldaien writes that he "[doesn't] condone the practice" of piracy and has implemented similar checks in previous mods, he writes that the ownership check is more personal protection for himself than some sort of moral judgment or punishment.

"It is to protect me against asset injection of copyrighted material," he writes. "It is the party who facilitates copyright infringement who always takes the fall, never the end-user who commits the crime. So pirates—take my actions as some sort of punishment if you will, but they're not even about you—I don't care in the slightest what you do as long as I'm not tied to it."

While it's not that hard to find re-modified versions of the mod that skip the piracy check (derived from source code that Kaldaien himself posted on Github), that hasn't stopped some members of the community from taking the mod's piracy check personally. Kaldaien was banned from the original Steam thread regarding the mod (since removed), reportedly for calling one of the posters a "pirate moron." While posters on Reddit's CrackWatch community are overwhelmingly negative about the mod's piracy check, responses on a new Steam forums thread are mostly appreciative of the mod's graphical fixes.

The whole affair is like a twisted echo of the recent situation surrounding Mass Effect: Andromeda, which added stronger Denuvo protections alongside an official update fixing facial animations and other issues. While that new version was recently re-cracked, it's interesting to see that both publishers and modders are re-introducing DRM through other tweaks and fixes.