Chinese videogame pirate group 3DM pledge to cease piracy for a year to see how it affects legitimate sales

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Piracy has been around as long as there’s been things to pirate, and there’s been constant debate – reignited by Jonathan Blow tweeting candidly about his piracy concerns with The Witness – about whether pirated downloads of your game equate to lost sales. We might be on the verge of actually finding out. 

Instead of pirating stuff, you could instead play through our list of the best free games on PC, of which there are over 100.

Cracking group 3DM have pledged to not crack any single-player games as of tomorrow, February 8, for an entire year, to see how it affects legitimate sales.

“We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year, 3DM will not crack any single-player games,” says a 3DM representative on the firm’s blog, via TorrentFreak.“We’ll take a look at the situation in a year’s time to see if genuine sales have grown.”

For now, the firm will focus on localising games for their local market.

It will be interesting to see what impact, if any, the huge reduction in cracked games will have on legitimate sales, and perhaps the results will put the debate to bed once and for all.

It’s rather telling that Jonathan Blow has happily revealed sales figures for The Witness, despite it being heavily pirated, where Square Enix have kept quiet about Just Cause 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider’s sales, even though both of the studio’s games are protected by Denuvo anti piracy software.

We’ll pick this up next year once the results are made public. Until then, what’s your take on the whole thing?