Metal Gear Rising Revengance Killed by DRM on Macs

Disturbing news for Mac owners who enjoy playing video games without the need to install boot camp and windows.

Konami's critically acclaimed spinoff of the Metal Gear franchise found success on multiple platforms upon its release in 2011. About a year after it came out, The game found its way to Mac platforms, courtesy of software developer TransGaming porting the game.

If Mac gamers didn't already have it bad enough, A Reddit user pointed out recently that the developers responsible for porting the game have completely abandoned the game all together. As a result, Metal Gear Rising's always-on DRM (which goes online via TransGaming's servers to confirm the game isn't pirated,) no longer allows the game to be installed, effectively killing off the Mac port of the game entirely.

It all began when a Reddit user pointed out that the game would not start for Steam users.When TransGaming -a company built on porting games to Mac platforms- decided to get out of the gaming business entirely; changing their name to Findev, and restructuring their company to focus entirely on real-estate consulting. This was after the company sold all their gaming-related assets to NVIDIA. The result was that the now defunct TransGaming's DRM of choice --SecuROM-- can no longer verify that customers actually bought the game.

SecuROM itself comes with an already controversial reputation. Developed by SONY DADC, SecuROM is notorious for its inaccuracy when it comes to actually verifying whether or not a copy of a game is pirated. Microsoft even discontinued its embedded support for the DRM software upon the release of Windows 10, citing its security vulnerabilities.

TransGaming built its brand on easy ports of windows games to the Mac platform, using its proprietary runtime environment called Cider. Cider was a technology similar to -and based on- a popular software called WINE, which allowed Linux/Unix users to run Windows software on other operating systems without requiring Windows to be installed. Cider was a variant of WINE designed specifically for Macs. This meant that the games that TransGaming ported weren't a true port, like the ones companies like Aspyr or MacPlay would make. They were --instead-- mostly the PC version of the game with a series of software libraries stacked on top of it to run on MacOS.

Shortly after that Reddit post we mentioned earlier, Steam un-listed MacOS as an option on the Metal Gear Rising game's store page.