You can't. Pirated software often times ties in with hacker and con rings whom would love nothing more than yet another PC to place a trojan on.

And the cons feel less remorseful about hacking someone who's downloading illegitimate software.

I use a semi-private torrent site. Usually the torrents with a lot of seeders aren't going to contain viruses, especially if you check the comments - if they all say it's working then chances are there's nothing to be concerned about. The ones containing viruses just get reported and deleted.

I also use another forum that uses file-hosting sites to distribute files. And that's a HUGE site with tons of traffic every day, and contains just about everything you'd ever want (yes, even a lot of the really old and obscure games). Same deal - viruses get reported and deleted, and check comments to see if it's actually legit.

Again, I don't really use these anymore, just for the occasional TV show or something now. I wouldn't suggest you go looking for these things, because if you don't know what you're doing you probably will encounter something bad, just because like carnival said, if you Googled for this you'd probably end up at a lot of scam sites.

Thanks for the replies, it's nice to actually get an insight into this whole piracy thing since i really don't know much about it ( and will hopefully never get involved). Whenever a piracy thread gets opened on another website it usually gets locked down or closed but it's nice to see people can actually be civil and discuss it in threads like this on gog.

To me it sounds like such a huge risk 'pirates' are willing to take, not only do they face the chance of a virus but also the aspect of getting caught and possible prison sentences (although that's probably a whole different topic).

Agreed. Even if you hold an extremely anti-piracy stance you should still know how it works and what exactly it is you're dealing with. To discuss it is a good thing, as long as you're not doing any advertising, it shouldn't be a subject that should get locked or get anyone banned.

There's simply not too much risk at all if you know what you're dealing with. I only caught a couple of viruses all these years and almost all of them were due to not paying attention, and none were really difficult to get rid of. As for getting caught... I think that's maaaaybe 1 in 500 million or something - I don't think any pirate's concerned with that.

I dont know i used to buy cds where there were tons of games on it but i had no attachment to it, i had more fun in a game i bought then a game i downloaded for free.

The only torrents I find hard to find are those for rare/foreign games or obscure films & music. Even retro older games can be found in torrents...albeit mostly in packs with other older games(Dos packs/80's packs/RPG packs/etc), and only on a few torrent sites as opposed to new title.

Also yeah those sites asking for info are scams....not really legit(for pirating anyways) at all.


Use a good free virus scanner with realtime download scanning and also only download from torrent links that have alot of good ratings & seeds......usually those marked legit by users are legit if they have high ratings & many seeds(DL lines). The realtime virus scanner will usually scan the files as they download, and you can even run a manual scan on the downloaded files again after download to be sure, or use more than one virus scanner.

As for loaded with viruses, it's mostly propaganda.....there are some torrents with viruses but these are mostly people taking safe torrents and adding viruses to them and naming them the same to get people infected to either gain access to their PC or sometimes are even filled with viruses by competing torrent makers/crackers to discredit their rivals.

Though as I said before, the good torrents usually have good ratings marking them as legit, and wiht good software to protect one's self it usually goes alright for the cautious downloader.
When I have done it, it's mostly for older impossible to find games, or if it's a newer game I download and test run it for a few hours or so then either pay and keep it or delete it if I don't like it/can't run it due to bad system requirements.

Most of the time, downloaders face(maximum) fines as downloading(at least in U.S.) is civil matter not a criminal one. In order to go to jail here you'd likely have to massively share or upload the games and stuff you download or sell them to people.

Indeed, I remember back when I used to pirate software they would always come with an accompanying .nfo file that was filled with information from the crew that did the crack.

It's kind of a shame in many ways that the commercial studios often don't put a similar level of care into their products. It's completely unacceptable that pirated copies are an advantage beyond just the cost.

Piracy is going to win the cost competition, but it doesn't have to win the convenience or reliability competitions as well. Those are completely up to the studios to win or lose.

Agreed 100%

Yeah, I agree: Tis sad that the GOG version of SMAC is inferior to the version of SMAC/SMAX that I can pirate. :-P

(No, I'm not looking to reopen that can of worms; just couldn't resist a friendly jab.) That's similar to what I recently said to a friend about the Net as a whole. Searching for good info online nowadays can be real pain: sites that return matches to your search terms but are simply "ad-traps" (having no relevant content, that just want you to click or download), scams, sites that load lots of ad content before allowing you to view the page to determine its usefulness, copy-and-paste jobs from other sites, etc. Some people seem to bash Wikipedia a lot, but anymore it's a primary source of info for me because I don't want to have to wade thru the garbage to get to a few bits of information.

But maybe it's just time that I stopped using Google? Any recc's on a decent search engine? I don't want something super-exclusive, because smaller sites often contain useful gems of info or entertainment, but *some* kind of filtering of the dross might be desirable...

That's actually a fair point which I hadn't considered. I guess that would be another way in which doing it legitimately would put a legitimate copy at a disadvantage.

Not to be Mr. Pro-Piracy but if you bought the game on GOG and sent EA some cash I don't think you're really being much of an asshole if you download the expansion elsewhere. If GOG ends up selling the expansions instead of giving them away you can just make up for it and buy them then.

The key for me is that you support developers and publishers. As long as you do that I think you're morally in the clear. For instance I bought Alice back in the day and I just paid full price for Alice Madness Returns. Because I wanted a box though I don't have the remastered Alice in my version, which is frankly BS. I don't think it would be morally wrong of me at all to download that remastered version somewhere because I supported both games with full price purchases and will buy the remastered version if it ever comes out separately.

Yes... I agree also.

And its a really important point that needs to be driven home. Price is not the only determining factor when a consumer places value on a product and decides to buy or not.

Frankly, it is why GOG's product has such value. It's the extra work to make mine a hassle free experience...

Extra Credits pretty much summed up that point in http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2653-Piracy

So even some folks in the "industry" get it. I actually just take that as proof that the real reason is to kill 2nd hand sales.

Oh come on!, you know what I'm talking about. You know as well as I do that to play copied games on a console you have to go to the trouble of hacking it (or have someone else do it for you which is going to cost money) and after that you're risking to lose your online account. Only way to get around this is by buying a second console to use for online gaming and having a hacked one for playing copied games. Not quite as troublesome as downloading a cracked PC game is it? How many people do you know using a hacked console?