Yoko Taro won’t tell you how he put DRM into his signature. But he did, somehow. And with that special technique, Neir: Automata’s creator can tell that “nearly half” of all autographs claiming to be from him are fakes.
This was revealed in a post on X, where he denounced a specific signature someone else had posted. “This autograph is a fake,” his post reads. “I include small unknown features in my real autographs to prevent reselling, so I can tell when one isn’t genuine.”
Nearly half of the autographs being resold are actually fake, so please don’t buy them.
This post led to a set of replies that were equally fascinating and predictable. If Yoko Taro has some way of doing autograph DRM… what is it? People showed off their autographs, with many trying to figure out what exactly is going on.
At this point, results are best described as ‘inconclusive’. There’s no shortage of slight variations in all the posted signatures, so pinpointing a single feature or style is difficult. The only person who knows the difference between a cheap fake and a genuine article seems to be Yoko Taro himself.
With most varieties of anti-piracy, they’re most effective when its methods are kept very secret — and this looks to be no different.
Now, is it possible that this is all fake? That Yoko Taro is just making stuff up, hoping to induce enough paranoia that the market for pirates and scalpers gets tanked? It’s possible — though it’s hard to imagine that fans would get mad at a lie here. People who resell fake/copied signatures are pretty scummy, so a blow to them is a win for justice-seekers everywhere.
Yoko Taro Destroys The Scalper Market With One Neat Trick
Unlike games, where one .exe file is just as playable as its copy, much of the value of an autograph comes from the story behind it. So if that story is a lie, if the signature has been copied or outright faked… to say it “sucks” is a bit of an understatement.
In their coverage of this story, PC Gamer held a sentiment worth echoing here: if you need the money, selling off a genuinely-autographed thing is something worth doing. But if you go to signing event hoping for a signature-backed payout at the end, and especially if you’re a scalper, that’s no good.
An autograph may help increase the value of something, but that’s not really what it’s for. It’s there because it’s cool. So Yoko Taro throwing a hearty dose of paranoia upon the secondary market based on a maybe-real unexplained skill isn’t the end of the world. And it helps ensure that those who get his autograph get it because they want it, and because it’s cool — nothing more.
