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.
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.
…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.
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.