Malwarebytes is offering a free 12 month premium key to pirates. No matter how you acquire their premium software, you can get your own key valued around $30. It sounds like they have run into a problem where pirates are generating legitimate keys that might later be assigned to a paid customer and not work. The program information is here. This is not the first time companies have offered amnesty to pirates. Windows 10 is a free upgrade to pirates, and the very successful game Witcher 3 reached out to pirates, even allowing them to add the game to their gog galaxy client without having purchased it.

I have no opinion either way, but I'm interested how others feel about it. Should companies be fighting piracy or accepting it? Gabe Newell is quoted as saying "Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem". At least with gaming, I think several companies like Ubisoft and EA have been responsible for a rise. It feels like you can't get a complete game unless you preorder from 7 different retailers to get all the preorder bonuses. Pirates get them all in one package. Sorry in advance for this topic, I know it may seem like I'm beating a dead horse.

8 years ago*

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Windows 10 won't be free for pirates! Microsoft clarified it three months ago, yes you'll be able to upgrade with your pirate key, but it will generate illegal key for W10, so you are still pirating the software.
I'm pretty sure they perfectly know who is pirating their system and could exclude them from free upgrade, but in W10 updates will be automatically installed (not for the enterprise version, but we are not talking about those) and I think that M$ will distribute update, sometime after the free upgrade plan will expire, that will punish pirates (as for now in W7 there is only a communicate that you can just skip and a black background).

8 years ago
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GFWL made me pirate games I had owned because it would not let me play them without doing so

8 years ago
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Lol GWFL was horrible. I'm so glad that dark souls got rid of it.

8 years ago
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And both batman games. And so many others. It was a cancer of gaming world.

8 years ago
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Closed 8 years ago by Idiosyncratic.