this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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When people get games from e.g. fitgirl-repacks, do they play them offline? (just curious, I don't play games)
Online features don't work on pirated games in 99% cases (it says "connection error", "failed to connect to insert the developer company name here servers" or something similar) but I'm afraid the telemetry still works.
You're missing a pretty key fact; any good repack is going to disable everything trying to connect outwards. Otherwise the methods for pirating that content will be easier to detect and block.
It's also really easy to just check for yourself when a program is phoning home. https://superuser.com/questions/99039/any-good-utility-to-track-outgoing-traffic-and-requests-from-win-pc
You'd be surprised how often none of that is touched, and I really doubt any repackers are bothering to block any network calls if the original scene release didn't. I've used some equivalent of OpenSnitch that prompts on all network requests that I haven't explicitly allowed already for the past decade, and at least 90% of all games I downloaded during that time tried to phone home.
ALWAYS set firewall rules to block internet access to any software you pirate.