It looks like there will be a rough time ahead for video games pirates. Top Chinese piracy group, 3DM, has announced that it will cease cracking activities on games for a whole year. Apparently the group is looking to study the effects of piracy on sales of games; and this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it is struggling to deal with the Denuvo encryption that protects some games.
The leader of the group ‘Bird Sister’, also known as Phoenix, announced that 3DM would halt all cracking activities from Chinese New Year – which was on Monday. According to the blogpost, the group will “actively deal with” cracks produced by overseas groups that are posted to their forums. Nobody is actually sure what this means, but it is assumed that the posts will be taken down to prevent the forums from becoming a distribution point.
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3DM has had a rough time trying to break the Denuvo encryption that protects certain games. The last bit of news from the group indicated that it was close to giving up on Just Cause 3, which has still yet to be cracked. It is expected that the similarly protected Rise of the Tomb Raider will prove just as difficult to pirate. Of course, this is probably excellent news for the video game industry which continually claims that piracy is hurting sales.
We’re not sure what brought the group to attempt this experiment, but it should provide a very interesting outlook for the video game industry in 2016. 3DM is not necessarily the only piracy group in the world, but it is large enough that it should put a big enough dent in cracking activities – at least one that can be significantly observed.
[Source: TorrentFreak]
