Some companies are known to do this with their games, like Blizzard (StarCraft, Warcraft III, Diablo II), CDPR (Witcher 1, 2, and 3).

Please forget about StarCraft (BroodWar), WarCraft 2 & 3 and Diablo 2.
These old games do no longer have battle.net support, so CD key check is kinda obsolete.
When you connect it to a free server - I don't call names - there is no CD key check at all because blizzard never provided an API for 3rd party servers.
So there are "generic" CD keys you can use.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com

Does anyone have more other games that require latest patches to legally remove the DRM?

Rally Championship Xtreme has one:

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Rally_Champ … al_improvements

Not sure if it counts, but Emperor: Battle for Dune also has an official alternate installer that bypasses SafeDisc, because it apparently did not work correctly for some users when the game was released:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Emperor:_Ba … assing_SafeDisc

Edit: Quake 2, 4, Doom 3 and Prey (2006) also have official patches for it:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Quake_II#Availability
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Quake_4#Availability
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Doom_3#Availability
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Prey#Essent … al_improvements

All games in Unreal series up to UT2004 , except for Unreal 2:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Unreal#Availability
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Unreal_Tour … nt#Availability
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Unreal_Tour … 03#Availability
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Unreal_Tour … 04#Availability

I'm not entirely sure if it's down to the patch, but these games don't require a disc or have any other DRM problems with these patches:

• Daikatana - 1.3 unofficial patch (this patch improves lots of stuff and transforms it from an awful game into a mediocre game. But first patch it to 1.2 official)

• Deus Ex - Not a patch, but if you open DeusEx.ini and change "CdPath=D:" to "//CdPath=D:" then it will no longer check for a disc

• Return to Castle Wolfenstein - 1.41 multiplayer patch (and for the "Game of the Year Edition" it's already 1.32 for single player and 1.4 for multi, and i don't think it needs a disc for either)

• Soldier of Fortune - 1.07 patch

• Sin - 1.11 patch

As far as i know, these are the latest patches for these games.

Disruptor wrote on 2025-07-04, 20:30:

Please forget about StarCraft (BroodWar), WarCraft 2 & 3 and Diablo 2.
These old games do no longer have battle.net support, so CD key check is kinda obsolete.

first time seeing this, except for warcraft 3 which does indeed seem to have been killed off after the remaster. for the others though i'm not able to find any such mention and D2 does look to have fairly recent videos of closed battle.net gameplay, as well. could you provide a source for this, please?

auron wrote on 2025-07-08, 13:24:

first time seeing this, except for warcraft 3 which does indeed seem to have been killed off after the remaster. for the others though i'm not able to find any such mention and D2 does look to have fairly recent videos of closed battle.net gameplay, as well. could you provide a source for this, please?

When you log in into battle.net with old StarCraft/BroodWar it says there is an update.
Unlike the old patches it won't patch the game but it will try to install StarCraft Remastered instead.
You can play this for free but it will be limited to old 4:3 640x480 quality then.

When you don't do the update you still can force it to connect to a private server.
But I'm not sure whether the forum rules allow me to explain that in detail.

Toward the end of 2011 SimBin made patches available to eliminate StarForce DRM from some of their games. Game owners had to send in a photo of their game discs, and SimBin would email a link to a patch for that specific game. I know this applied to GT Legends and GTR FIA Racing, and it may have been applicable to other SimBin titles as well.

For GTR FIA Racing the patch was a Version 1.6.0.0 update, and for GT Legends it was a Version 1.1.0.0 update.

I think SimBin was trying to curry favor for the newly released RaceRoom The Game 2 (and get contact info for potential buyers).

Quake 3 removed the CD Key requirement in 1.32

The free version of GTA1 and GTA2 removed the CD check and moved the audio onto the hard drive (was previously Redbook)
However this version of GTA1 lost the dos version of the game