Game Maker DRM goes haywire

An indie game making tool went haywire over the weekend after its anti-piracy DRM developed an unusual problem.

Customers who had obtained Game Maker legally suddenly discovered that in-game resources such as sprites were overlaid with an image of skull and crossbones – a safeguard designed to kick in in illegally sourced copies of the software.

Maker YoYo Games has subsequently agreed to remove the skull and crossbones image from its DRM protection, although it has refused to deactivate all of the DRM measures included in the release.

We’d LOVE to be able to remove the protection completely, but we know that vast numbers would simply copy it if it was that easy,” the developer stated, according to Game Politics.

There are many levels to the current protection system, and while many are visible like this, there are also many hidden so that we can always tell when a final game was created with a crack.

We expect an update to go out tomorrow to remove this protection, and will move away from the ‘destructive’ protection like this, to more passive methods to help protect innocent users who through no fault of their own, somehow trigger it.”

The only method for users to repair their damaged assets is to uninstall Game Maker, delete all its data and associated registry files and then reinstall the whole lot.