Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

GOG digitally signs their games and have no DRM, thus no need for cracks.

If you can get a hold of a GOG version, you can check its validity.

For games outside the GOG ecosystem, they are all unfortunately at risk.

I played Baldur's Gate 3 via a pirated GOG version on release with friends until I was able to afford my own copy, then moved the saved game over to the legit copy.

I only trust two things when I pirate games: official GOG installers and FitGirl repacks.

No.

I pirate everything, but am very very reluctant to do so with software or games.

I only pirate in cases where the company involved is just too gross to support (looking at you, Adobe), or if there's absolutely no other option.

But I consider pirated software and games absolutely suspect 100% of the time, because I'm old enough to remember when every keygen was also a keylogger, and every crack was also a rootkit and touching any pirated software was going to give you computer herpes without fail.

So maybe it's not that bad anymore, but I mean, do you fully trust in the morals of someone who would spend the time helping you steal someone else's shit to not add just one more little thing to it for themselves?

Running any binary that you can't examine the source of (and confirm it was built from it without modification) is risky. It's mostly a balance of trust and risk. Even developers have been known to insert what we could malware.

That said, if you get your cracked content from a trusted source, I'd say it's generally safe. Otherwise, exercise extreme caution.

Is GMG an official reseller? Maybe I am out of the loop, but I thought they operated in the grey market.

Run them in a sandboxed VM?

VM escaping is not impossible, but its probably outside of the ability of most cracked games with malware.

Even better; Go with a bare metal linux install, and then use a sandboxed VM.

Even less malware is going to be able to VM escape and then also have any idea of what to do in a linux environment, purely because the vast, vast majority of ~~exploits~~ (I should say malware, not exploits per se) are designed to fuck up Windows.

Is this perfectly safe?

No, but nothing is.

Any legitimately purchased game with closed source, kernel level anti cheat could be doing literally anything to your PC, and you wouldn't know.

Search for this keyword : "Fmhy". It the acronym of free media heck yeah and It's a curated list of safe sites. Fitgirl repack are the safest you can get.

hmm... lets see. Do I buy and download the game filled with a rootkit or download the version that doesn't have one?

DODI repacks 4 lyf

Nothing is ever really safe. If a developer or publisher gets compromised, an attacker could put malware in an official release and push it through Steam. https://outshift.cisco.com/blog/top-10-supply-chain-attacks

You should always use protective measures like antivirus and dropping unnecessary privileges, and use extra measures when running anything from a less trusted source.

Short answer: no.

Long answer: hell no.

depends on the source, but generally no, run the game in a vm or container

I would say that online games anti cheat systems are probably about as bad as it gets for privacy.

As others have said its more risky to use pirated games from a digital security perspective especially if you are running it as an administrator. So its good to try and find a source you trust and monitor your system for suspicious activity.

My bet is most users here do not practice good data security and assume their "common sense" will prevent them from malicious files.

"cracked games" are different from "pirated games".

I'd be wary of cracked games. Pirated games that aren't cracked, much less-so

Consider splitting the costs with your friends on GoG?

Have a dedicated gaming pc that you never login to any of your real accounts with. Keep it off the network you use with the rest of your machines. Install windows and all the legit software you need. Create an image of your disk. Install pirated games and play them. Every so often wipe your disk and reset to your image.

Plundering in the early-mid 00' was dicey but in the last ten years I think the only problem I've had was getting a tarbomb once and even that could have an honest mistake on the part of noob coder. I am a little wary of games that have online hacks and normally block all online features. Honestly you have to be more careful with torrent client than anything. Most of them try to back door a ton of garbage when you first install them. And yeah always use a vpn or you'll get angry messages from your isp.

Yeah, i haven't had anything go wrong in at least a decade.

Well, since I run them in Linux, they’re basically sandboxed in an environment that most malware isn’t made for, so as long as I’m downloading from reputable sources like Fitgirl or DODI, yeah. I figure my chances of picking up a virus from a source like that, given my setup, is highly unlikely.

thats why i always run close source software in bwrap. not only cracked games.

I run them under a different user, but the same for non-pirated games.

If it's a "trusted" source, as in a popular one, such as a certain link from a certain girl that is fit, yes.

Otherwise another option I've done for a while was buying cheap keys from greymarket type resellers, though for those I only did them from AAA publishers never putting their games on sale and on a second account (idea being you minimize risk and if something did turn out to be a stolen key, which was a problem for a while on those kinds of sites, a chargeback isn't going to hurt a AAA publisher as much as an honest small published in house indie dev team).