The creator of the paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation mod, PureDark, has said that he will be placing “hidden mines” in his future mods.
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In an interview with IGN, ‘PureDark’ has now commented on his mod being cracked, and has said that future “hidden” mines will cause future mods to sometimes work, fail, crash, and whatnot.
“It was expected since it was something I put together within a day or two, but I did get enough patrons so it’s done its job”, the modder told IGN. “So from now on I will place hidden mines in all my mods to make it harder for these people. They might be able to find and bypass some of them, but they will never know if they have found all of them. The cracked mods will sometimes work, sometimes fail, sometimes work but [be] very wonky, sometimes even crash and they won’t even know if it’s a bug or just them using the cracked version, and they will never have the support I’ve been always providing to my subscribers.”
https://www.pcgamesn.com/final-fantasy-xiv/gshade-malware#:~:text=An%20unauthorised%20Final%20Fantasy%20XIV,included%20as%20%22a%20lesson%22.&text=The%20creator%20of%20a%20popular,shut%20down%20a%20user’s%20PC
Tldr; dude put malware in his program and it didn’t go over well with the community. His rep is in tatters and basically all his users jumped ship.
There are always alternatives out there, especially if you give people the push to make one.