Piracy Group Suspends New Cracks to Gauge Sales Impact

There’s always a heated discussion regarding the reason why people illegally download content. Some argue it’s simply down to wanting the latest film/games/album without paying, while other figures like Gabe Newell have suggested piracy is a “service problem”. Whatever the case, it’s evidently clear that there are quite a lot of people downloading torrents, or files directly from hosting sites. Obviously, when it comes to games, pirates rely on cracking groups to circumvent various forms of DRM including Steamworks. One particular group, is based in China and goes by the name of 3DM. This is one of the most popular organizations especially when you consider the high piracy rate in China. Not so long ago, pirates eagerly awaited the group to create a crack for Just Cause 3. However, the group’s leader, ‘Bird Sister’ claimed the game was incredibly challenging to crack and suggested advanced anti-piracy technologies such as Denuvo could eliminate pirated games within the next two years.

Recently, ‘Bird Sister’ made a shocking announcement and said the piracy group will no longer provide any new cracks for at least a year:

“We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year, 3DM will not crack any single-player games,”

“Cracks by overseas warez groups will still get posted on the [3DM] forum, and we will actively deal with these,”

“We’ll take a look at the situation in a year’s time to see if genuine sales have grown,”

It will be interesting to see if the lack of new cracks will have an impact on sales figures. However, this will be very difficult to judge unless the figures are taken from very successful new releases. Plus, surely it won’t have an impact if another cracking group comes out with a cracked version. Perhaps, this is just an excuse to forgo the difficult encryption from Denuvo. This is a cynical viewpoint, but there’s some merit to it.