The China based cracking group 3DM (videogame pirates, basically) have announced they’re taking a year off to see whether their dodgy dealings have an effect on sales. And that’s “sales”, not “sails” (#PirateBantz).
3DM leader, known as “Bird Sister” (pictured below) wrote on her blog that the group will stop cracking single player games as part of their effort to measure their effect on legitimate sales. Although no doubt someone else will just fill the gap they leave.
Bird Sister wrote:
We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year [February 8], 3DM will not crack any single-player games. We’ll take a look at the situation in a year’s time to see if genuine sales have grown.
In that time, there would doubtless be all kinds of variables that effect videogame sales – economy, competitive game releases, and more besides. One group of pirates – however large – taking a break will probably have little effect, so 3DM’s experiment might well prove fruitless. Still, we’ll just have to wait and sea (last one).
Last month, Bird Sister said her team was “unable” to crack Just Cause 3 which uses a secondary encryption system called Denuovo. Apparently, the game has yet to be cracked.
Around the time they tried to crack Just Cause 3, Bird Sister had expressed concerns that by 2018 there’d be “no free games to play in the world”.
Having to pay for products that people work hard to make? What a horrible world that’d be.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.