Game Piracy Has Just 2 Years Left

The founder of the infamous Chinese based cracking forum 3DM has said that the days of people playing pirated games are drawing to a close, because it’s just becoming too difficult.

A game pirate attempts to gain access to Denuvo’s development facility, yesterday

The issue for game pirates is that the encryption software being used by game developers is becoming harder and harder to break. 

“…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,” said 3DM forum founder Bird Sister.

The cause of this apparent doomsday scenario for game pirates has come after it was revealed that the attempt to crack Just Cause 3 had all but defeated 3DM’s resident cracking expert. The issue stems from the inherent robustness of the game protection technology increasingly being used in the release of triple AAA games.

The anti-tamper technology causing the headache for 3DM is designed by Austrian based Denuvo Solutions. The problem for pirates is that Denuvo’s product strength lies in the fact that it a secondary encryption system that encrypts the already in place DRM products in the game.

DRM or Digital Rights Management are embedded aspects in most games that are there to stop people from just copying games and distributing them for free.

While Birdsong still believes that Just Cause 3’s encryption will eventually fall to their continued efforts, the ramifications are sure to be felt not just within gamers, but within the software community in general.

The problem for game pirates, isn’t that Denuvo is impossible to crack, it’s the length of time, it takes to crack the new games.  The time was that new releases were often cracked and available on torrent sites before they were even released, but that hasn’t been the case now for several years.

Gamers are, in general, an impatient bunch, and want to play the latest games as soon as possible. Being forced to wait two, three, or even six months while waiting for games to be cracked, means that many of them will have moved on by the time the job is done. By that time, most people will have moved on and be eager to play the next big release.

If Birdsong’s End Days prediction comes to fruition, then software developers and vendors from other sectors will probably be quick to jump on the bandwagon.