We’re always being told that piracy is killing the media we view, from television to films to video games. Now it seems that one piracy group has decided to call the video game industry’s bluff on that.

Chinese group 3DM were in the news last month talking about how it’s getting harder to crack video game anti-piracy software and have pledged that for a year they will not crack any single-player game starting February 8th, just to see what sort of an effect it has on legitimate sales of the game. Instead they will focus their efforts on localising games for their local market.

“We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year, 3DM will not crack any single-player games. We’ll take a look at the situation in a year’s time to see if genuine sales have grown.” a representative of the group said on the group’s blog on TorrentFreak.

Piracy debates have raged for years, and just gotten worse since the advent of the Internet and its growth. There’s certainly been arguments on both sides of the debate so it will be interesting to see if this does have any effect on sales.

Mark February 8th 2017 down in your calendars, that’s about when you can expect to see 3DM’s results made public.