About 3DM

3DM

3DM, published at 3dmgame.com, is a Beijing video-game news portal founded in 2001 that became, by the mid-2010s, simultaneously one of China's largest single-player game sites and one of the world's best-known game-cracking groups. It began as a game-localisation group, built a vast news, download and forum operation, and then — through its public battles with the Denuvo anti-tamper technology, a self-imposed halt to cracking in 2016, and a lost copyright lawsuit in 2017 — became the central case study in China's transition from pirated to purchased PC games. Its history cannot be told in past tense alone: the portal still publishes game news for Chinese players today, but its significance is inseparable from the piracy era it helped end.

Origins: a localisation group founded in 2001

3DM was launched in 2001, according to its Wikipedia record, and is headquartered in Beijing's Fengtai District, owned by Beijing Sandingmeng Software Service Co., Ltd., with creators recorded as Su Feifei and Liu Yan. Chinese game-portal histories describe its origin as a game-localisation group: volunteers who translated foreign games into Chinese for a domestic audience that publishers largely ignored. Localisation was the respectable root of an enterprise that later grew notorious, and it remained part of the operation throughout — as late as 2016, when the group suspended cracking, it emphasised that translation and localisation work would continue. The localisation era also built 3DM's community: its forums became a gathering place for single-player PC gamers at a time when China's industry attention was turning to online games.

Growth into a game portal

From the localisation base, 3DM grew into one of China's largest single-player game news, download and forum sites, as its sourced directory description records. The portal formula combined news and reviews with the practical resources single-player gamers needed — patches, mods, trainers, community discussion — in an ecosystem where official Chinese releases of foreign single-player titles were rare. Su Feifei, the group's head, told NewsChina Magazine that piracy had become "a liability, not an asset," making it hard to shift users toward legitimate services such as player training and game localisation: a striking admission that the portal's commercial future and its cracking past had come into conflict well before the public rupture of 2016.

Bird Sister and a public piracy group

Unusually for a cracking group, 3DM operated in public. Its founder and leader used the pseudonym "Bird Sister" — in Chinese, Bu Si Niao, literally "phoenix" — and members maintained public profiles on Sina Weibo and a blog announcing their activities, as Wikipedia records from Kotaku's reporting. Kotaku in February 2016 called 3DM "one of the world's biggest" PC piracy groups. That publicity was double-edged: it made Bird Sister a folk figure to Chinese gamers — the group is nicknamed San Da Ma, "third auntie" — but it also meant that when rights-holders decided to act, there was no anonymity to hide behind. NewsChina reported nearly ten million Chinese gamers subscribed to Steam as the legitimate market grew, and quoted Su's April 2016 microblog post: "3DMgame will be doomed [if it continues its piracy operations]. It is an irreversible trend that no one can stop."

The Denuvo battles

3DM's international fame peaked over Denuvo, the Austrian anti-tamper technology adopted by major publishers to protect launch windows. NewsChina records that in 2014 3DM was the first to break an early Denuvo protection. By late 2015 the contest had reversed: Avalanche and Square Enix's Just Cause 3, released 1 December 2015 under the latest Denuvo, resisted cracking, and attention fixed on 3DM as the group most likely to break it. In January 2016 Bird Sister wrote that she anticipated that within two years no more cracked games would be available, attributing the shift to Denuvo — remarks Eurogamer headlined as the tide turning in the war with PC game crackers. Weeks later, in February 2016, the group claimed it had in fact found a solution path for the latest Denuvo titles, while insisting any release would not be a high-profile official one.

The 2016 halt

On 6 February 2016, TorrentFreak reported 3DM's most surprising announcement: "We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year, 3DM will not crack any single-player games," Bird Sister said, setting the start at Chinese New Year — 8 February 2016 — and the duration at a year, "to see if genuine sales have grown." Cracks by overseas groups would still be discussed, but 3DM said it would actively deal with them on its own forum. PCGamesN and other Western games media covered the pledge prominently; commentators debated whether it was a genuine experiment, a graceful exit from a losing technical arms race, or both. Either way, the world's most public cracking group had publicly renounced cracking — an event with no real precedent in warez history.

The Koei Tecmo lawsuit

The legal reckoning followed. In early February 2016, NewsChina reported, 3DM pulled a cracked version of Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII immediately after receiving a warning letter from a Chinese law firm acting for the Japanese developer. Koei Tecmo sued, and in November 2017 a Chinese court ruled against 3DM: TorrentFreak and Kotaku reported damages and legal fees totalling 1.62 million yuan — about US$245,000 — and an order to stop distributing pirated Koei Tecmo games. Bird Sister had publicly questioned why a Japanese company should hold copyright in a game derived from Chen Shou's third-century Chinese historical novel; the court treated the novel as public domain but the game as a protected work, and found clear infringement. The judgment stands as a landmark: a Chinese court holding a domestic cracking group liable to a foreign publisher.

Steam and the market that changed

3DM's retreat cannot be separated from the legitimate market's arrival. NewsChina's account records that Steam began accepting yuan credit-card payments in November 2015 and gained some two million Chinese users in the following six months, reaching more than eight million users in mainland China — its fourth-largest market after the United States, Russia and Germany — while only about US$20 million, 0.1 per cent of spending, had gone to single-player games in the piracy era's accounting. General manager Liu Ming predicted that within two years the warez business would no longer pay. The economics that had sustained cracking — no legal way to buy, no local pricing, no Chinese payment rails — collapsed within a few years, and 3DM's own leadership said so, on the record, repeatedly.

3DM today

The portal at 3dmgame.com continues as a Chinese single-player game news and community site: news, reviews, downloads of legitimate resources, and forums, published from Beijing. The cracking chapter is closed history, but it permanently shapes how the brand is read — no profile of 3DM can omit it, and this one has treated it as the documented centre of the story. What survives is the audience relationship built since 2001: generations of Chinese single-player gamers learned about games through 3DM's localisation, news and forums, and the site's post-piracy existence is an attempt to serve that audience inside the legitimate market its leaders publicly conceded was inevitable.

Why 3DM matters

3DM matters because its biography is China's PC-gaming biography in miniature: localisation volunteers in 2001, portal scale in the download era, global notoriety in the Denuvo wars, a public renunciation in 2016, legal liability in 2017, and legitimate publishing thereafter. Western outlets from Kotaku and Eurogamer to TorrentFreak and NewsChina documented each turn because 3DM, uniquely, conducted its piracy career in the open and explained itself as it went. For researchers of copyright, of Steam's China growth, or of Chinese gamer culture, 3DM is not a footnote but a primary source.

Official website

3DM is published from Beijing at its official website, 3dmgame.com. Its Chinese nickname is San Da Ma. Readers researching its history should rely on the dated record — the January and February 2016 announcements and the November 2017 court judgment — rather than on the many undated retellings of the cracking era.