Video game piracy may be going away, a thought that is sure to terrorize every consumer who feels entitled to a free lunch, but while we’ve been hearing this statement from publishers for years accompanied by their games being cracked and leaked at launch or, in some cases, weeks and months before. We hear it and groan about the prospect of a new piece of half-cocked DRM that doesn’t so much stop piracy as it does harass legitimate buyers and diminish the overall product, but this is the first time we’re hearing about it from the pirates themselves. The message isn’t so much a cry of fear but a sigh of resignation, there’s a sense that publishers are indeed winning this war.
This has been going on for nearly two years now, thanks to a little piece of software called Denuvo Anti-Tamper. While it hasn’t made games completely uncrackable, it has severely lengthened the amount of time and effort required to break the games, in many cases until months after launch when the initial wave of interest is already over. It took a month to crack Dragon Age: Inquisition, six months for Fifa 15, and titles like Just Cause 3 and FIFA 16 still have not been cracked as of mid-January. Chinese group 3DM noted in one of their posts that their cracker nearly called it quits over Just Cause 3’s impenetrability.
According to that same group, piracy may go the way of the dodo within the next two years, at least as far as AAA studios and big releases are concerned. 3DM, meanwhile, has actually pledged to stop cracking single player games for the next year in order to examine how sales are affected by their absence. Whether or not that’s actually their motivation, or if it is a coming sign of defeat, will have to be seen.
And for the record, MMO Fallout does not support piracy of commercial products for any reason. Private servers for abandoned MMOs and abandonware, modifications, and tweaking software to function on your computer are completely different topics.
MMO Fallout 