Could offline physical piracy be good to games?

The other day I saw a bunch of USB sticks for sale at a gas station with greatest hits of various artists and music genres and it got me thinking of physical piracy again. It's something I haven't consumed for over 15 years, but with the fall of prices of USB sticks it is completely viable economically if you do the math, and I hope it can even help game piracy.

A 64GB stick costs about 5 US dollars today, and it can carry most AAA games with a few exceptions. That's 1/12 of the full price, and if you consider the pirate will charge you another 5 dollars for his work, you will still get the game for 1/6 of the release price. But you will obviously think: why would I pay 10 bucks for a game I can download for free? Here is the catch.

There are many games that haven't been cracked lately because crackers don't have any incentive to do so other than their own self-satisfaction. If they got paid by some pirate group to do so, then things would be different. I can imagine someone in Russia making a group and paying crackers to crack a game so they can sell it for Russian gamers in the black market. If they come up with some way to make it as hard as possible for the buyers to share these cracked games among them, they could make a lot of money with this.

And here is where the anti-piracy organizations might help the organized crime. With their cat-and-mouse hunt to close online piracy groups, they will make it harder for people to share it online, making the offline piracy more attractive. Would you mind paying 10 bucks for an USB stick or 5 bucks just to copy something to it instead of paying some VPN that might not be enough to hide your traffic?

For old games this wouldn't work, because they are already very cheap on Steam, but for new releases, I can see this working, and everybody, buyers and sellers, would very happy with the money they're making and saving.

aldalire ,

I would unironically pay up to 50% of the worth of a AAA game (maybe through crypto, Monero would be a perfect usecase for this) to to a cracker to download a non-DRM game from them than to pay the full amount to the studio.

Adding DRM makes no sense. People might be incentivized to pay and download directly from the cracker’s site (lets say, fitgirlrepacks) than from torrent reuploads that might contain malware. That might be where the profit incentives come in to entice crackers to do their valuable work.

Melody ,

...Assuming the flash drive isn't loaded to the gills with malware alongside of every game it offers to install...that sounds fair.

But let's be real; No legitimate company stands a chance of doing this without getting sued into oblivion. Unfortunately that means the risk of getting viruses and malware with your purchase, likely ransomware or cryptominer droppers, is really high.

...but let's assume you're technical enough that you can disarm all the malware on the USB stick and clean the cruft out of it. Then; yeah...maybe you'll get your value's worth.

aldalire ,

I'm not talking about paying for USB's; there's definitely an inherent risk to that if you don't know where the source is. It could work within groups of close friends. I'm talking about downloading and paying for a game directly from the person/group that cracked it and through their site. I think OP is trying to make a financial incentive for cracking to exist in the future.

veniasilente ,

cracking the games

to put some DRM on them

to sell them

Fam, half the point of pirating is getting harmful middlemans out of the way. If I wanted a game and it was available on the Cracked Store for, say, $10 plus $15 for the DRM unlock, I'd just go to 1337x or somesuch to get the normal pirated version.

sleepybisexual ,
@sleepybisexual@beehaw.org avatar

I'd love to see it.

Would be fun to see someone selling USB filels wotht ROMs. Like those weird batocera drives

conciselyverbose ,

DRM on pirated games is fucking gross as shit.

Joejoe582 OP ,

Would you rather have a game cracked and pay a fraction of the official price for it or pay 70 bucks for it on Steam and have to play it with Denuvo? I could live with some old-fashioned DRM if it meant I was saving 60 dollars.

conciselyverbose ,

I would much rather pay full price than still pay for a DRMed version that's effectively guaranteed to be supporting some sort of organized crime group. Mass distribution at scale, with DRM, by definition means Russian organized crime, or a drug cartel, or some other global bad actor on that scale that's doing shit like trafficking humans, arms dealing, drugs, etc, as well.

But ignoring that (and that I generally buy my content), I wouldn't pay $.10 for an illegitimate copy that had an added layer of DRM on it. It's fundamentally fucking repulsive for some subgroup whose whole business relies on bypassing someone else's copy control to add their own.

onlinepersona ,

Just use I2P and share anonymously. No need to do it physically, get identified by a recording on a client's phone, and have your door busted in by the popo. Anonymous overlay network is where it's at.

Anti Commercial-AI license

aldalire ,

Cool, a fellow i2p enthusiast! We really should transfer or at least offload existing piracy infrastructure to i2p. I’m gonna keep shilling i2p as well haha. By then, piracy will be nigh unstoppable. I dream of the time when pirates rule the high seas once more.

DarkDarkHouse ,
@DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

There’s dozens of us! But seriously, i2p has a future for this

Joejoe582 OP ,

The problem here is not only sharing games but cracking them too. That is the main problem actually. I'll quote myself just to clarify it.

Crackers are disappearing because the job got too hard and they don’t have any incentive to do it. Add money to the equation, make them earn a little for it, and then both gamers and crackers will benefit from it.

pastermil , (edited )

If they come up with some way to make it as hard as possible for the buyers to share these cracked games among them, they could make a lot of money with this.

This kind of thinking is the bane of humanity.

Joejoe582 OP ,

What I'm doing here is seeing this with a practical mentality. Crackers are disappearing because the job got too hard and they don't have any incentive to do it. Add money to the equation, make them earn a little for it, and then both gamers and crackers will benefit from it.

veniasilente ,

Want to put some economic incentive to pirating? Make it a shared / solidarity pool. Or get in touch with a state / nation that has more active interest on digital sovereignty and preservation so that it can be set up as some sort of UBI.

pastermil ,

I'll tell you what's practical. If pirates start charging me for stuff, and go thru all the hassle making their stuff difficult to copy, I'd rather just buy the original thru official channels.

LiveLM ,

If they come up with some way to make it as hard as possible for the buyers to share these cracked games among them, they could make a lot of money with this.

DRM for Piracy? Disastrous

SolarPunker ,

Question: are we sure that USB sticks are superior to CDs considering the costs and transfer speed? In recent years I have greatly re-evaluated blu-rays, for example.

cmnybo ,

Blurays will be much more reliable and will write much faster than cheap flash drives. A double layer disc only holds 46.5 GiB though and triple layer discs are still somewhat expensive.

LodeMike , (edited )

Blu-Rays would be good if a write drive didn't cost $130+ (for the 100GB models)

cmnybo ,

I see an LG WH14NS40 on amazon for $55 US that will write triple layer discs. Where are you finding $130 drives?

LodeMike ,

Amazon search results.

LodeMike ,

Oh. Its a 5.25" drive bay thing. I don't have one of those :(

SolarPunker ,

They are not so cheap in Europe.

YourPrivatHater ,
@YourPrivatHater@ani.social avatar

No its the same as scalping but the original thing is free.

Moonrise2473 ,

No, I'm not paying for that

The money goes only to the seller, not to the cracker that worked hard just for the glory

Joejoe582 OP ,

What makes you think that? If the cracker doesn't get paid, he won't crack the game. Actually, the crackers himself might be the seller.

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