How to get started pirating video games?

Morose@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 58 points –

As the video game industry is approaching the norm of expensive games, I would like to save my money while still being able to play these games.

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FitGirl repacks are generally considered safe. Make sure you have the right site, and use a VPN if you're in a country that cares about piracy.

There's a bunch of other good resources in the megathread

+1 for the vpn. The last isp letter i got was from one of her torrents, and it wasn't even that popular of a game.

Woah really? ISPs coming out and bothering you cause you pirate stuff? Never heard of it. I'd jump ship immediately if I got one such letter.

ISPs coming out and bothering you cause you pirate stuff? Never heard of it.

You must have the distinct privilege of not living in the USA or several other Western countries.

I’d jump ship immediately if I got one such letter.

If you mean jump ship off that ISP, there's nothing you can do. You can go to another ISP (if there even is one in your area), who will do the exact same thing. You can jump ship entirely and not have internet, I guess.

While I am from a Western country it's indeed not the US.

No, in my country nothing of that sorts happens. Piracy is still technically illegal but only a misdemeanor for the end user, provided they don't make any money off the pirated stuff, and no ISP has ever cared to narc about it, to my knowledge.

Of course it's probably different for crackers and folks who run piracy oriented forums.

Yeah I did mean "jumping ship" to a different provider, assuming they didn't all behave like this. And of course I just assumed there were more than one to choose from.

Nasty stuff. VPNs really look like a blessing, from this perspective.

Piracy is still technically illegal but only a misdemeanor for the end user

(In the US) it's only a civil offense, ie they could sue you for damages, it's not a crime in the way most people use the word (misdemeanor or worse) - it can be a crime if you knowingly infringe copyright for profit. Otherwise it's civil.

no ISP has ever cared to narc about it

It's not that ISPs care what you're doing; they get a DMCA notice about a user and pass it on to the user. So the ISP just doesn't want to be seen as enabling the issue by ignoring the notice. The ISP isn't liable for what you're doing, as long as they don't claim it's non-infringing, or just ignoring the notice, or whatever. ISPs/companies don't want to be liable so generally they just pass along the notice.

It's just for distributing - so, you can download anything you want, basically, nobody is watching that. Download ROMs all day long, or whatever you want. It's just uploading that causes problems. So if you are using bittorrent and uploading what you download, you'll probably get a notice. Copyright holders can see that you are sharing something of theirs, and your IP address says what ISP provided your access, they complain to your ISP and your ISP says "you shouldn't do this," so they've passed along the note and maybe blocked your access until you click a button that says you received the note or whatever.

So you have to use a seedbox or VPN in a country that doesn't care about the DMCA. I use a seedbox, so I just have a computer in another country download/upload things. Whatever I download from the seedbox is encrypted and downloading isn't really policed anyway... all the uploading is in a country that doesn't care.

Never heard of it.

I dont believe you.

Huh... Too bad, I guess. It's not a thing where I live and as it happens none of my international friends have ever mentioned it.

Check the megathread man!! Has all the info you need. But here's a quick summary

There's generally 2 routes of pirating video games (on windows), and those are either Torrenting or Direct Downloading

  1. Torrenting
  • Torrenting uses the bittorrent protocol to share files p2p, meaning it is direct IP connections. Torrenting a copyrighted file (such as a movie, cracked game, etc) can be illegal depending on your country. Usually, in first-world countries it is illegal, while in 3rd world/developing countries they could care less. This all depends on your country, research it first. To avoid any legal issues (in countries where this applies) people use VPNs (virtual private networks) to mask their IP from people who want to report you to your ISP.
  • The torrent indexer I recommend for games would be 1337x.to since they are heavily moderated and have a low chance of having malware inside the file.
  • A torrent client I recommend : qBittorrent
  • VPNs are to be taken with a grain of salt. Many VPNs pay for reviews and have horrible software and/or privacy policies. I would recommend you stay clear of any popular VPN which is recommended on youtube videos, podcasts or billboards; they have the scummiest advertising methods, lack essential features and sometimes are owned by ex-adware companies (such as NordVPN, Surfshark VPN, ExpressVPN, Atlas VPN, Private Internet Access, Cyberghost, etc).
  1. Direct Downloading (Commonly referred to as DDL for short, which I will be using.)
  • DDL consists of downloading files from file hosting websites, such as mega, zippyshare, google drive, 1fichier, etc. You will want to use this method if you either cannot torrent in your country (meaning it's illegal) and do not want to invest into a VPN to hide your torrenting business.
  • The easiest way to download games through DDL would be with fitgirl (fitgirl-repacks.site). Simply download the files through the DDL mirrors, extract together, run setup, wait, and there you go. Takes a long time to install with a bad CPU, but it is very easy.
  • If you cannot find the game you're looking for on fitgirl's website, the next best option for DDL would have to be https://cs.rin.ru. It has a learning curve if you have no experience with cracking/pirating, but easily learnable.

For people who ddl from mega, check out (megabasterd) on github. It'll be worth your time.

I’m looking at the GitHub now, but I’m not seeing anything that screams “must have,” is there something not obvious that it does?

Its just a nice way to grab huge content on mega if u don't use it frequently or don't have their membership, as they require you to pay to unlock the download limits on their platform.

It downloads much quicker and I believe it's a lot easier to get past Mega's bandwidth limits

The megathread recommends using Mullvad but afaik Mullvad has stopped port forwarding support recently. I've been using Mullvad for a while (albeit not for Torrenting) how safe do you reckon is it to use Mullvad without port forwarding support for Torrents?

It's safe, just that your seeding capabilities will be ass, aswell as the download speed on small torrents (<20 seeders). It's also needed for private trackers. Imo you should be fine if you don't seed much or aren't in a private tracker.

  • 1337x.to For Dodi and Fitgirls
  • rutor.info For RG Mechanics, Fitgirls and maybe other good repacks for yourself.

all you need to know is how to extract compressed files. if youre familiar with that then installing cracked games will be easy for you. as most have said, fitgirl is a great place to get games because she has been in the game a long time and is considered a credible source. most installers will copy the crack for you but generally the most work you have to do after a pirated game install is copy the crack folder over the files in the game folder, disabled firewall access if it asks, and possibly run as administrator. thats it. if the place youre getting games from is trustworthy youre safe to ignore any anti-virus warnings because generally game cracks can cause false positives.

Always check for gog versions, they are much more easy and safer to work with since they still have the certificate.

I recommend 1337x as it's heavily moderated and most of its uploaders are trusted.

Beware of 1377. sometimes 1337 domain would transfer you to a 1377 one.

This is my personal strategy, works pretty well:

  • Grab a repack from fitgirl /dodi / kaoscrew via torrent when possible. Use the official sites.
  • Check gog-games, if it's available without drm
  • Check rin (Steam Underground) if it's not too large
  • Grab from GGn or whatever other private tracker might have it.
  • Get straight scene release, if available, as last resort.

This covers probably 99% of PC games, emulators are a different story.

As for getting started, grab 7z (an archiving utility) and know how to mount an ISO. Stay safe, don't download from sketchy sites. Since you are dealing with executables, some things will look (and act) like viruses, use your best judgement.

https://steamunlocked.net/ is not too bad

That site is not considered to be completely trustworthy due to some virus infected downloads being found in the past. Just be sure to check for malware as you should be doing for all downloads.

AFAIK there was no malware found, unless you are talking about their ads on the site, then yes, those can be malicious. I think one reason why people don't like SteamUnlocked is that they just reupload games from other sites

Buy a shared game account. Of course if it's available in your country. This is for Denuvo stuff usually.

Any ideas as to where one might be able to find such a service?

I don't know where to look for other countries. Because for me it's on mainstream marketplace. IIRC they're in game forums fo trading and stuff.