Flight Sim Labs is a company that makes very nice aircraft and sells them as downloadable content (DLC) for Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Selling DLC for flight simulators is big business and, in the case of Flight Sim Labs, a reputation. it means being able to charge a premium. Some of their DLCs cost upwards of $100 dollars, which to regular gamers sounds like a lot for just one plane, but to Flight Sim enthusiasts it’s about the price they’d expect.
Piracy is of course a huge problem for game developers and publishers, with a large number of people showing little interest in buying games or their DLC. The Flight Simulator market is no different, but an aggravating factor is that often the developers making DLC for flight sims are smaller studios that feel the pain of piracy even more. Therefore, it is understandable that companies want to take steps to make hacking more difficult.
There have been numerous studies of piracy in the music industry showing that when it comes to piracy, those who pirated the most content also bought the most content, suggesting that pirates may be using the music exchange as a discovery device to help them. Discover the bands you want to support. While there are fewer studies on video game piracy, Valve’s success with its online digital game delivery platform (known as Steam) suggests that the two industries are similar. Steam executives have often stated that they built their business by turning people who previously pirated games into paying customers by offering better service than pirates.
Of course, there are plenty of companies that never discovered the secret ingredient like Valve did. These companies try to solve the problem of piracy in ways that are less favorable to the consumer. One tool companies love to turn to is digital rights management (DRM), which is software and/or encodings that are supposed to prevent copying. How well DRM actually works is debatable, as it usually only acts as a minor inconvenience. Games like The Witcher 3 have been blockbuster bestsellers despite having no DRM at all, while games like Sim City built from the ground up to be as hard to hack as possible in no way guarantee the publisher’s commercial success. In fact, in the case of Sim City, it was such a commercial failure that when its next game also underperformed, the developers went out of business.
So it seems a bit strange that developers go out of their way to harm paying customers to go after hacking customers, but they do. And in the case of Flight Sim Labs, they really took that feeling to the extreme by bundling Malware into their DLC and then, when they got caught, they used the very flimsy defense that their Malware was actually DRM. In the words of Fidus Information Security.
What the hell were they thinking?!
When Fidus analyzed the malware, it found that it would in fact only activate in the event of a hacked serial number, but it also found that the data was not very secure while being sent, nor very secure at its destination. Fidus also questioned why the developer would need people’s Chrome usernames and passwords and raised the legal and ethical considerations.
There were plenty of people on the Reddit Flight Sims Subreddit who made their displeasure at the developer’s actions clear, but also plenty of people on the Flight Sim Labs forum who also said they would continue to support the developer despite the breach of trust.
It’s clearly a touchy subject, but ultimately the impact of the decision to put malware in DLC will play out in the coming months. The only people who have the power to change things may well be consumers, and if consumers don’t, is this a dangerous precedent to set?