Game cracking group takes a year off as a “genuine sales” experiment

A major game piracy group says it will cease releasing any its DRM- and copy protection-stripping cracks for the next year, ostensibly to examine whether or not its efforts have any material effect on game sales. But there's little reason to expect this "experiment" to yield any useful results.

Torrentfreak reports that Chinese piracy collective 3DM has decided in an "internal meeting" not to crack any more single-player games as of the Chinese New Year, which was on February 8. Then, after a year spent away from the cracking scene, the group says it will "take a look at the situation... to see if genuine sales have grown."

That's an interesting idea, but it's hard to imagine 3DM's unilateral action having that much effect on legitimate game sales. After all, there are plenty of other active groups in the cracking "scene" that will try to fight to increase their own exposure by filling the hole left by 3DM. And even if every major cracking group collectively decided to take a break, some bored kids with debuggers and too much free time would no doubt step up to fill in the overwhelming demand for cracked games.

But let's get crazy and assume that, somehow, all video games released for the next year became immediately impossible to pirate (maybe an all-powerful wizard was involved?). Even then, it would still be pretty hard to discern a direct effect on individual game sales. Sure, you could see if the 2016 Call of Duty sold better than the 2015 version, but it would be tough to separate out a large number of confounding variables like the state of the economy, competitive game releases, and the general quality of each game, among others.

With that in mind, it's worth questioning why else 3DM might want to take a break from its cracking efforts. You might remember that the group recently made headlines for its difficulties cracking the Denuvo-protected Just Cause 3; troubles that have continued in the month since.

At the time, 3DM leader "Bird Sister" wrote that the state of game protection is getting so good that "in two years' time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world." Given that, maybe 3DM's year-long break is just an attempt to get ahead of the game, a way to bow out gracefully before the technological arms race is truly lost. It's like 3DM is saying to Denuvo "you can't fire me, I quit! For a year... But it's really just an experiment."

That's all speculation, of course. Still, this hard-to-explain, unexpected break in effort from one of the world's largest cracking groups could be an interesting new sign that the battle between protection and cracking is starting to shift.