Pirating games may not be dead, but the industry just took a massive hit. In a surprise announcement last Friday one of the largest cracking groups, 3DM, would no longer be cracking games.
We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year [February 8th], 3DM will not crack any single-player games.
According to a post on TorrentFreak, the announcement came after attempts to crack Square Enix’s Just Cause 3 proved unsuccessful. This announcement definitely came as surprise, but it wasn’t totally unexpected. A month prior to 3DM departure from the high seas of software piracy 3DM’s spokesperson and leader “Bird Sister” stated that there would be no more pirated games in two years.
According to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years’ time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world.
Just Cause 3 had been out for a month at that point and it had still yet to be cracked; nearly driving the China based cracking group’s lead “cracking guy” to breaking point.
Recently, many people have asked about cracks for Just Cause 3…The last stage is too difficult and Jun [cracking guy] nearly gave up…
What is the cause of the cracking group’s ire? A relatively new company called Denuvo, who boasts a record 272 days before Lords of the Fallen, a game running its “anti-tampering” software, was cracked. While other Denuvo-protected games have been cracked it has taken much longer, like Dragon Age: Inquisition which took over a month. Others like FIFA 16 remain uncracked.
While it’s interesting to see a group like 3DM jump ship, their reason for doing so is what makes it almost noble. Bird Sister states that 3DM’s decision to drop anchor is to see if pirating games actually affects the industry.
We’ll take a look at the situation in a year’s time to see if genuine sales have grown.
In the meantime 3DM will still share other cracked games on their forum and work on translating and localizing games for their internal market.
Will Denuvo bring about the end of pirated games, or will tech savvy pirates find a way around its encryption? Regardless, it will be interesting to see how 3DM’s departure will effect on the industry as a whole.