Although you might be a real devotee of video role-playing games not interested in games of any other genre, it still seems impossible to be able to purchase all the new releases on the market the number of which is growing exponentially. Of course, you will hardly meet a real gamer with a long list of favourite genres who can actually afford buying all the games he would like to play.
Needless to say, the possibility of downloading a cracked version of games might seem tempting especially if you are not concerned about the moral issues. Yet, before you finally decide to commit such a crime (which is officially a crime indeed), think twice whether it is worth it since there are many dangers coming with your decision.
Getting your PC infected
The worst possible outcome of downloading and installing a cracked version of a game is getting your computer infected. Actually, this is also a rather popular situation, so you should really keep it in mind.
Purchasing an official game, whether it is a digital one or its physical copy is guaranteeing you that you will get exactly the product you are paying for. Legitimate stores will never be distributing unofficial copies or pirated versions of the games since any harm made to your machine because of their products will harm their own reputation a lot.
This is definitely not the case with pirated games you can download online. The malware which can be found in many cracked games can vary from being just annoying to being seriously harmful. Pirated files can infect your computer with spying programmes, delete all the files on your computer, impair its performance or even use your machine for mining Bitcoins. The latter situation happened to a large group of people who decided to install a pirated version of Watch Dogs. As you can imagine, a Bitcoin mining programme was draining out the system resources of PCs for its own purposes.
Of course, not all of the pirated games will turn out to be dangerous for your computer, but you can’t know how it will be in your case before trying to install such a game which is definitely not worth the risks.
Getting inappropriate content instead of a game
The risk of downloading something that is far from the game you were trying to obtain in an illegal way is rather high. For instance, instead of receiving the gam you can copy some NSFW content on your computer.
Although for many people it might not seem like a serious problem, but you should really aware of the possibility of getting some other illegal materials. You should remember about it in particular if you are going to download an illegal copy of a game for your children instead of buying an original one.
Losing online gaming privileges
This risk is connected to using pirated games on your console.
For instance, ten years ago, there was a massive ban of a million of Xbox Live players by Microsoft. This happened since these players modified their consoles the majority of which were Xbox 360 in order to make it possible to play cracked games.
Not only playing pirated games can result in being banned from the Gold membership time and the account balance of Microsoft, but also playing new games before the official dates of their releases and attempts to access the player accounts which do not belong to you can cause the ban.
Same ban is applied to the players of PlayStation Network as well. As you can estimate, this means wasting far much money than the value of the game you tried to play illegally.
Getting a game which is not working properly
Undeniably, software developers are totally aware of the fact there will always be people willing to access their products for free. Although the copyright law is enforced intensively in many countries, it is still not so easy to catch every person who is actually using cracked software. For that reason, many game developing companies are not waiting for the pirates and their clients to be caught and take their own measures for saving their games from being misused.
Some of them are using special algorithms preventing pirates from cracking their games. In this case, you will hardly find a pirated version of such a game in the first place and, even if you manage to do it, it might be something totally different. Certainly, if you have read the previous parts of the article, you know what kinds of things can be packed into torrents with games.
Of course, if you can’t find a pirated version of the game you wanted to download, you might be annoyed. Yet, we bet you will be even more annoyed when you find out that the game you were playing for hours suddenly can’t save your progress, becomes totally frozen or finishes abruptly.
All of these things are possible since many game developers started making various creative functions activated when their games are cracked , thus, preventing the for proper functioning.