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.

To be fair, nowadays malware behavior is more likely to come from the companies than the cracks.

Get scene releases from trusted sources (not public trackers) and ensure that the hash matches what is in the nfo on predb.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Flatpak bottles app

I use Lutris

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