Yeah, I use them for games I only have on cd. It originally started back when I had a small laptop without a cd drive, so running a cd involved attaching an external drive, which was a pain in the ass. These days I just use them because my laptop is quieter without a cd in the drive and because I have to spend less time looking for the cd or worrying about where it is whenever I travel. Still, since most of my games are digital now I only have a few cracked games.

I bought bioshock for iOS, they remove that game from the app store without any warning or refund.
this is the last game I have to pirate. I already paid for this game.

Also I used no cd/dvd cracks for my dvd version.

Finally, if a game exist in my language, but the digital drm-free version only got english I usually download the translation patch. I've done this for many games.
Gog usually is the worst store to support other languages.

Sometimes I still do as I own a lot of physical copies that I care about. Also many of them use a copy protection that is incompatible with WINE on Linux, whereas the game itself works fine.

Without cracks, the hell I'd have perfectly unscratched disks from 1997 :-)

I have played games on Linux/wine for a long time. I'm not sure how things are now since I haven't touched my old discs for a long time and the two that I have bought more recently were unprotected, but back in the days of CD checks, most of them just always failed on wine, which was infuriating when the game would otherwise work fine. So it was either to crack them or to forget about them.

I don't foresee buying more than a couple of disc-based games for PC anymore, and many of the titles on my shelf I've re-bought here during good sales to save myself all the hassle with discs if I ever want to play them again. There's very little need for cracks anymore.

Well, I had to do a lot of odd stuff to get that one to work. It's been years, so I don't remember exactly all the problems and solutions, but I remember that I had to fuck around with it more than any other game, first to get it to work at all, then to get it to work without crashing all the time for one reason or another. I think getting it to work smoothly was actually more challenging than the game itself :D

That sucks. I do so enjoy Bethesda games, but damn are they buggy as all hell.
I hope in the end you were at least able to play the game and enjoyed it. If you ended up hating it after all that... bleh

Fortunately I encountered all the issues early on, so once I did get around them, I had a very good time with it and played it to the end. I actually liked more than most people seem to. The really frustrating thing was that I picked it up quite a while after the release, so I expected it to be fixed by then. But nope :D

What's going on here? I counted 15 replies before someone finally made the obligatory drug joke.

Yes I do all the time, there is no guilt to crack something you paid money for if you ask me. Not only that, but as a preservationist/collector, it helps preserve the disc much better than using the disc itself all the time to play the game. Not only that, but I use it for some games to bypass the evils of SuckuROM and the like, especially in the case of games like Crysis Warhead where I want to still be able to play it without having to activate it online. Considering how Windows 10 has pretty much dropped support for these DRM methods, cracks are pretty much the best way to get around that issue these days.

As far as I'm concerned you're well within your rights to crack any game you've legally purchased for any reason you think you might have.

As it stands I haven't got any games that benefit from cracks. I think that Crysis was the last one (there was a noticeable improvement in stability). But the principal still stands.

edit: minor typo

Broadly I agree, although I tend to only install a crack if the copy protection is incompatible with the latest version of Windows as I don't like messing around and turning drivers back on. Which broadly means most CD games these days.

With some old CD/DVD based games yes definitely. In particular most of the old Tom Clancy games because the copy protection built into them sucks ass and tries to tell me my game is not an authentic copy and the official Ubisoft workaround is to disable DMA on the DVD drive and slow down all CD/DVD access to a crawl just to make their copy protection happy. If I eject the disk, click the mouse to start the game and then push the disk in sometimes that satisfies the copy protection. Eventually I get sick of that bullshit and just download a crack for it. That's for single-player only gaming. If I'm playing multiplayer however then I always have to install a crack because Ubisoft says the CD key is invalid for every single game because pirates have written key generators that eventually collide with people's legitimate store bought keys and Ubisoft happily invalidates the keys that legit customers bought and they don't give a shit about it and expect you to go buy a new copy of the game which also has an already invalidated key before you even open the shrink wrap. They'll tell you to keep your keys safe so that someone else doesn't see it over your shoulder or whatnot, instead of owning up to their DRM sucking ass, and their method of dealing with pirated keys harms their legit customers.

So... I crack that shit as it's the only way to play the game other than using LAN mode over Hamachi with added lag on games that support it.

With some other games I use a NoCD crack if the game doesn't have a built in way to do noCD and putting the CD in is a huge annoying PITA, although some games have a hidden command line switch to the game EXE, or some other mechanism to do it like Starcraft which you can copy the huge .MPQ file to the HDD in the game folder to stop it from wanting the CD.

With some games though, I've replaced my store bought CD/DVD version with the GOG version instead to avoid having to deal with a lot of that nonsense.

One problem with cracks though is that a shit tonne of them are infected with malware and may be heavily encrypted to hide it from antivirus/antimalware software. The readme file for the cracks tell you to disable your malware scanner to avoid "false positives" when in reality almost all of these are loaded with actual malware, as are 99% of the key generator programs out there and they just con people into disabling their antivirus protection so they can infect people's computers. That's a PITA to deal with, so unless I can find a truly clean crack I don't bother. It has to pass a barrage of 3 or more security scans before I'll consider installing it though.

In general, cracks are as much of a pain in the ass as they can be convenient, but it's best to avoid them if possible.

Did that once or twice years ago. Then moved to digital, then moved to Android.

Absolutely, I can't be arsed grabbing a box off the shelf whenever I want to play a game when all the disc is doing there is spinning up, spinning down, wearing out my drive.