Quite renown within the piracy circle, 3DM, a Chinese-based piracy group have announced on the Torrent Freak forums that starting on the Chinese New Year, they will halt all cracks on single-player games for a year in order to see how big of an impact their work has on the game’s sales. To further instill this, no cracks for these types of games will be allowed on the 3DM forums.
While this sounds like an interesting experimental reason, it’s also worth noting that earlier, the group’s leader ‘Bird Sister’, had mentioned that new waves of anti-piracy measures have become made cracking games more difficult to actually do. Examples of this include the Just Cause 3’s anti-tampering software. She was cited that:
“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,”
If expectations are right, even if 3DM pulls out of the ‘cracking game’, the hydra effect will take place and even more people will come out to fill the gap that 3DM pulls. If not, we’ll hopefully see a growth in sales numbers for games in the coming year.