Pirating Group to Stop Cracking Some Games to Evaluate Impact on Sales

China-based cracking group 3DM, the team that recently said anti-piracy measures on PC games will be so advanced by 2018 that it may bring about an end to pirated games, has made another big announcement.

TorrentFreak reports that 3DM leader "Bird Sister" wrote on her blog that the group will stop cracking single-player games apparently in an effort to measure the impact it has on sales.

"We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year [February 8], 3DM will not crack any single-player games," she said. "We'll take a look at the situation in a year's time to see if genuine sales have grown."

This announcement comes a month after Bird Sister said her team was unable to crack Avalanche's open-world game Just Cause 3, which uses a secondary encryption system called Denuovo. According to TorrentFreak, the game has still not been cracked.

Bird Sister does not mention Denuovo by name in her blog post, however. Head to TorrentFreak to read their full report.

BioWare's 2014 RPG Dragon Age Inquisition also used Denuvo, which adds to whatever other form of DRM a developer/publisher may put on a game. For that game, Denuvo was reportedly able to keep pirates at bay for an entire month, which was deemed a long time.

DRM is a controversial and debated topic in gaming. Assassin's Creed publisher Ubisoft has admitted that DRM cannot stop piracy, while The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red doesn't put any DRM on its PC games because it thinks DRM is the "worst thing in the gaming industry."

This story has been updated.