FSLABS adds malware to their DLC, claiming it’s "DRM"

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, quite a reputation. means being able to charge a premium. Some of its DLC costs upwards of $100 dollars, which to regular players 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 feeling the damage of piracy even more. So it’s understandable that companies want to take steps to make hacking more difficult.

There have been numerous studies on 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 music sharing as a discovery device to help them. discover the bands they want to support. While there are fewer studies on video game-related piracy, Valve’s success with its online digital game delivery platform (known as Steam) suggests that both 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 a better service than the pirates.

Of course, there are plenty of companies that never figured out the secret ingredient the way Valve did. These companies try to solve the problem of piracy in ways that are less than consumer friendly. One tool that 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 blockbusters despite having no DRM at all, while games like Sim City built from the ground up to be as hard to hack as possible by no means guarantee the publisher’s commercial success. In fact, in the case of Sim City, it was such a huge commercial failure that when its next game also underperformed, the developers went out of business.

So it seems a bit strange that developers would go out of their way to hurt paying customers in order to go after hacking customers, but they do. And in the case of Flight Sim Labs, they really took that sentiment to an extreme by bundling Malware into their DLC and then when they were surprised 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 also found that the data was not very secure while it was 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 Reddit’s Flight Sims subreddit who made their displeasure at the developer’s actions clear, but also plenty of people on the Flight Sims 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 over the next few months. The only people who have the power to change things might well be consumers, and if consumers don’t, is this a dangerous precedent to set?