Safest way to run pirated games?

It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you're familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that's why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they're distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody's going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say "Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!" on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you'll find that in almost all cases, it's actually just a generic, non-specific detection of "tools associated with piracy or hacking" or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it's literally detecting the fact that it's a keygen, and saying "that's scary! you won't want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don't worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!"
It's not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It's classic FUD tactics and they're all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.
- Downloaded a game which Windows Defender flagged as high-threat for containing "Cracked game content" the other day. Why yes, my cracked copy of this game IS cracked, thank you for noticing.
- Somebody should create a piracy bible, and make this message part of it
- Unless you inspect every line of code and/or monitor your computer activity to a super human level then you'll never know.
  Viruses don't behave like a neanderthal like they used to 20 years ago, so just because you don't notice a virus doesn't mean you don't have one. Let's be honest, viruses are still a thing and botnets have become a thing. These don't magically appear from nothing.
  You shouldn't be blindly trusting anyone on the internet, especially those not abiding by the laws. People and entities can be impersonated. They can behave differently at any moment.
  Personally i would do one of three things, run pirated content, in a VM, on a separate drive, or on a dedicated computer - because why take the risk when you don't have to.
  
  I trust the pirates more than the corporations.
  Remember the Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal?
  
  It's kinda trivial to limit their ability to do anything in Linux though. It's not as if virus authors are gonna waste their time trying to exploit a demographic that is both small and extremely fragmentary when they can just write for windows.
- You wouldn't download a virus
  Piracy is THEFT
  
  I think the joke might have been missed here. 😵
  
  All those companies are stealing from their users. If I steal from a thief, is it really theft?
  
  Winners Don't Use Piracy
- Maybe times have changed but when I was in the warez scene 25+ years ago and essentially pirated every game I played, I saved all those games and the keygen.exe files and when they get scanned by modern AV they all come back infected. If anything it's different because viruses are pointless now with the internet and there are much broader malware injection points nowadays than the minimal game pirating scene. But yeah I don't know what I'm talking about, just my historical POV.

To be fair, nowadays malware behavior is more likely to come from the companies than the cracks.
- If I don't hear that sweet 8 bit techno house blaring out of the PC speaker, then I start to worry
- So true. I'm in the warez-scene for >3 decades now, never had a single issue. But nowadays legit software, especially AAA? Ugh...

Get scene releases from trusted sources (not public trackers) and ensure that the hash matches what is in the nfo on predb.
- I disagree with the "not public trackers" part. Private trackers are better in a lot of ways but not everyone wants to bother with them. Stick to reputable release groups on public trackers and you'll be fine.
  
  That's fair. As long as the hash matches what is in the predb nfo, you should be good to go. I have encountered legit looking releases on public sites with edited nfo files though so definitely double check against a reliable source ce for that.
- I've only ever downloaded from public trackers (cause it's impossible to maintain the required seed ratio on private trackers and Debrid services are better anyway); never had an issue ever over 20-some years of torrenting ever. I don't bother verifying checksums cause it's unnecessary paranoia. All the major public trackers have good moderation teams; the malicious garbage gets called out in the comments and removed rather quickly.
  
  All the private trackers I use have bonus systems so you can still build ratio. It's usually a slow start on a new tracker but once you get established it's very easy to keep a 1:1 or better ratio. I don't bother with debrid services because paying for piracy is where I draw the line.
  As for checking hashes, I don't do it on any of the private trackers I use but OP seems overly paranoid so I figured it was solid advice for them. I always checked when I still used public trackers. Only twice did I ever find a mismatch, one was actually malicious and the other was just a random crc error.

Safest possible way? Separate machine on a different network, like guest Wi-Fi.
Realistically? I use containers blocking Internet and most file access and only use sources I trust not Internet rando releases.
- Right, to elaborate run a packet capture and monitor the IPs your system connects to when installing and playing the game.
  Never use a web browser with email or any other access to online accounts, clear all cookies after each browsing session.
  I'd argue have a separate boot drive with absolutely nothing stored, nothing critical, no cookies, it's single use of getting the games and hell, probably even run a VPN while playing the games so no tracing back to ISP public IP.

The official flatpak release of Bottles offers sandboxing. It comes from Flatpak itself, so other similar apps (like Heroic) might support it too.
Another option is to chroot before running Wine (so Z: doesn't point at the real system root), or su into another user (Wine inherits the user's privileges). It's also possible to run Wine inside a container, but GUI support is questionable.
Ultimately, running an untrusted executable is always a risk, regardless of the OS. If you want near-absolute safety, you'll want a different machine - either a VM or a heavily firewalled physical machine.
- Got any good guides for bottles? I've tried it recently and then got stuck on literally step one: installing the gog launcher just throw errors, I tried the 2nd gog installer and that one just leads to a black screen when I run it. I'm not sure what to tinker with, whether I try a different bottle or where to even start
  
  I don't personally use bottles, it hates running inside Hyprland.
  If you want games straight from GOG, try the Heroic launcher on Flathub. It has direct GOG integration and Flatpak's permission system. You can then use Flatseal (also from Flathub) to adjust its security - particularly if you want to install games outside $HOME, which needs an extra permission.
  You can also download the offline installer from GOG and just run Wine from the terminal.

Virtual machines. Disable drag-and-drop and shared folders/clipboard. It’s still not impossible to escape the vm but it’s very difficult and most malware isnt capable of doing that.
- Don’t use VirtualBox. It’s great for most things but it’s not powerful enough for games. Use VMware Player or Workstation and use the max amount of vram it’ll let you.
  
  Why not use KVM? It's FOSS, and it's pretty simple to use, at least in my opinion. All I know is that I wouldn't want any company spying on me if I was doing something illegal.
  
  I can't speak for VMware's technology, but the company just got bought by Broadcom, so treat them with Red Hat-like suspicion.
- I had one that intentionally detected a VM and just gave a message that said "Hello :)" and wouldn't load.

If you are on Linux you could simply run a firejailed wine on the executable and not worry about much, if the firejailling stops something from working then the executable is kinda fishy since firajailed games should work (I tried it and it works)

Bottles maybe? It's a flatpak so it's containerized.
You shouldn't worry that much anyway, if a pirated game has a virus it's most likely designed for Windows.
- Wine might translate the windows calls to Linux depending on what the malware does
  
  And that would achieve what exactly? The exploits won't be the same. The permission structure shouldn't allow it to do anything that would compromise the system. Maybe it can phone home, but to what effect?

Have a machine dedicated to gaming, no Internet access, with a swappable SSD. Make a clean OS install. Clone it to an external backup drive, then disconnect the backup. Install and play. If you want to play another game, format the drive, clone the OS from the external backup, install and play. If you want to play multiple games, have them on different SSD drives.
It's hardware sandboxing.
- If you're this concerned you might as well be running Windows in a VM with gpu passthrough.
- Very good solution. However, what benefit does the user get by formatting the drive every time a new game is to be installed? I mean, the thing already doesn't have internet access and no important data is on the drive anyway. Am I missing something?
  
  Well you have to get the install files moved over to the sandboxed PC somehow. If it is infected and you plug in the USB drive or whatever that goes back and forth, you could spread the virus through it.

It's not impossible, but it is HIGHLY unlikely that malware directed at windows (which must be 99.99999% of cracked games, as they are for Windows) can affect anything in Linux. Sure, it could be that your Wine/Proton suffers. What happens then? Easy. Remove, reinstall, move on.
Having said that,I'll if I were you, I'd just install whatever I want.
I play Sins of a Solar Empire regularly, and it's pirated. All the Command & Conquer games, StarCraft (1 and 2), Warcraft (1 and 2) and many more, all cracked.
And as someone else mentioned, I'm more concerned about malware and/or spyware from the publishers than from the cracked games uploaders.

Run them in Bottle, then disable internet access for the games.

What if I told you that using Linux ended my times of downloading fit girl and other repacks and I just decided to buy from steam? XD

I use Lutris
- It would be nice if Lutris had a "no internet" option, but i did not see such an option
  
  Lutris doesn't, but you can do firejail --net=none lutris
  
  Yes indeed. For now you can just use wine registry option (from the up arrow next to the wine glass) to open the windows registry.
  The you go in CURRENT_USER (don't remember the full name, on my phone right now) and something like software/windows/current_version/internet_settings . There you should have a "ProxyEnable" you can switch the value from 0 to 1 (just double click). Then right click to add a "string value" and name it "ProxyServer". Once created double click on it to change its value to something wrong like "http://bla.local:80".
  You can check internet by running exe from the wine environment (up arrow next to play) and start internet explorer from c_drive/Program Data
  
  If the bottles version is stable enough you could use flatseal
  (I'm not much of a lutris user so I don't know the state of it itself)

Flatpak bottles app

if you are 100% sure it's safe, get the Linux download if it has one.

My current setup is a halfway between insanely secure and functionally useless, so take this with a grain of salt;
SELinux on a debian LTS host, VM to something similarly secure (I use arch to try n get the debian LTS stability + arch quick patches but i might be wrong), hosting as s new user per app a wine podman container using x11docker'd xpra2-xwayland option, and gpu pass through it all.
This gives pretty fine grain control to each individual feature your app is allowed to run, and numerous layers in case like 3 of them all concurrently have security flaws.
Eventually I want to look into the feasibility of sliding g-visor in the podman layer, but I figured I should probably make sure I spend some time actually plating games lol

Not an expert, but I assume Bottles would be a good idea. It allows you to create separate wine prefixes for each app so if any app is malicious, it shouldn't affect any other one.

If you're really paranoid, you could run the game inside bubblewrap, inside a container.
- lmao literally my setup + a VM layer on top of it all.
  Maybe im too paranoid

- Encrypt the drive my friend or youre running more risk than usual linux (or just VM it and slice the risk right apart)

Get your games from trusted sources, make sure the hash lines up, and don't worry about it. Especially since you're on Linux--you'll be absolutely fine. Common sense goes a long way.

Spin up a VM, load the game on that.
- and get 3 fps?
  
  OP wants a safe experience, not a good experience.
  
  You can actually get near native peformance if you set it up correctly.
- Not sure why youre being down voted, theoretically this is like the safest way to run a game "on linux", even if you are using windows under it lol