Game piracy may be at an end, says 3DM; announces suspension of activities

A Chinese hacker group, 3DM, has announced that it will suspend all attempts at cracking single-player games over a period of a year to measure the impact on actual game sales, TorrentFreak reports. This announcement comes quickly on the heels of 3DM’s declaration that games will be “uncrackable” in two years’ time. Is this the end of the pirated game? Bird Sister, 3DM’s leader, says that, “We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year, 3DM will not crack any single-player games,” and also added that, “Cracks by overseas warez groups will still get posted on the [3DM] forum, and we will actively deal with these.” Both statements indicate that 3DM will not only stop attempting to pirate games over the course of the year, but that they will also actively hinder any video game piracy related activities on their forums. 3DM is among the more prolific groups responsible for cracking most of the games that you find on torrent sites today. They are currently hard at work trying to compromise Just Cause 3, a game that has remained crack-free since its launch in December last year, which is an unprecedented time span. The game uses a comparatively new protection system called Denuvo, that serves to protect the underlying DRM (Digital Rights Management) mechanism from hackers. The alleged motive of assessing the impact on game sales seems, to us, a bit far-fetched, but whatever their reason, video game companies will hopefully be able to breath a bit easier these upcoming months. Till someone picks up where 3DM left off that is.