What is a Ripped, Reloaded and Repack game release?

We use to play a lot of games on the Windows Operating System. Anyone can download a ton of PC games right away from the web for free/paid. I still remember those early days of my school. When I used to keep the collection of all the free games found on the internet. Majority of the people who play games on their PCs are aware of the term Repack, Ripped, and Reloaded games. We commonly categorize all of them under pirated games. Yes, they are not legitimate copies of the original games, however, all the three are not exactly the same.

Every edition has its own list of specifications an uploader has to offer. In this article, we are going to distinguish between them in detail. Note that: all the pirated games does not give 100% access to its gameplay since the online feature will be missing out on all the cracked copies. We recommend to purchase a legitimate version of the game to support the developers and at the same time enjoy the game to the fullest by playing multiplayer. So what’s:

Ripped Games

These versions go by the name “GameRip” too. The purpose of a GameRip is to keep the size as low as possible.  A ripped copy is basically a trimmed down version of an actual game so that it can run as intended and save the space of our hard drives as well.

What all are removed from a GameRip copy?

Commonly rippers use to remove the post-credits, extra video content, official soundtracks, Background music, conversational audio, and any extra expansion packs readily available with the video game. You might have noticed in some rip copies, all the cutscenes play as intended. However, the background audio supporting the visuals will be missing. Early days, the game rips were too famous that Google Search Engine used to auto-fill the term “Rip” when the word “Game” was typed in.

Finally, when all the extra content files are removed from the game, the rest of the content is put through a file compression tool. This tool then highly compresses the files resulting in a copy which requires a lot less space than the original. We can relate the process to that of a 7zip or Winrar which we use to compress our day to day files. The only difference is the uploaders/rippers use much more sophisticated compression tools to compress these copies.

Now when a user clicks the setup file of the game to install it on his/her system. The computer (CPU) will start decompressing the files to a particular/custom location to get installed. Nowadays it takes around 30-45 minutes to decompress/extract all the supporting game files from a single ripped file.

On the other hand, sometimes the term “Rip” stands for creating a backup of a specific content. For example: copying the files from an original/pirated DVD disc and creating a new ISO image file of it. It is similar to a DVDRip movie release. In which the content of the movie is copied (or ripped) from the original DVD of the movie when it gets released. We have already covered the same in a different article here:  Difference between CamRip, DVDRip, HDRip, HDTV, and other movie releases.

Reloaded Games

This version of the game is a bit different from Ripped and Repacked games as a whole. “Reloaded” is a group of tightly organized people who were involved in many of game leaks in the past. It was founded in 2004 and is a Warez group (warez is a term commonly used to refer a pirated software/movie etc). Usually, all the releases of the games are termed as capital “RELOADED” or just “RLD” on torrent.

This group/scene has a history of cracking the games prior to the official release date of many game titles. They have cracked Spore 4, Assassin’s Creed, The Sims 3, Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 4, Far Cry 4 and Ubisoft’s open-world hacking game Watch Dogs. Where the group was able to release Assassin’s Creed a month before the official launch date and the beta version of The Sims 3, 15 days prior to the official release.

In some exceptions, reloaded games refer to re-upload of a particular release on torrent or other websites. For example “The Sims 4 Reloaded” indicates that the original game’s link became obsolete or 404, and another uploader re-uploaded the same game so that other players are able to get the game. In such scenarios, the game is titled under Reloaded (usually without capital letters). In a re-upload, the uploader clearly mentions that the work is not by him and give proper credits to the original uploader in the description.

Repacked Games

In a repack release, the uploader does not remove all the extra content and files like the Ripped version. One can find all the cutscenes, post-credits, supporting audio, DLC packs, and extra content. A higher level of compression is applied since the game is shrunk down with most of the files keeping intact. In a majority of the Repacked games, selective options are prompted while in the installation process.

Selective or add-on options include MultiLanguage Packs (English, Russian etc), DLCs. Additional skins and extra pieces of software like Trainers/Mods Etc are also included. We can find lots of creative background music and visual graphics, especially designed by the uploader. FitGirl Repacks, BlackBox Repacks, and SKIDROW are among the best uploaders at the moment.

The original game files are first decompressed and then the size is trimmed down. It’s been stepped down in such a way that not much quality compromises are made. For example, trimming down the resolution of the cutscenes to 2K from 4K or 720p from 1080p etc. The same goes for the audio files too, 320kbps bit rate audio is trimmed down to 256kbps and so on. After that, the files are put through a batch of scripts or a tool like (Serp/Precomp). Then a command is executed to compress the selected files back to a single one. Commonly, all the game files are divided into two or more parts. In the end, these divided parts are then compressed down to singular bin format files.

I was getting nostalgic writing about the game releases in this article. Let us know in the comment section if it was the same case with you after getting to know about the differences between the three. Happy Gaming!