To play a game without buying it need to be cracked, or in other words the security in place needs to be hacked. In the olden days you would borrow your friends game of a copy and place a no-cd hack on it, so that you could use it. With online security this was more difficult and people had to make a new crack to let the drm think is was connect to the server and all was oké. Most companies bought DRM software from third party developers that got implemented into the games gold release (the version that goes on ace or store). To remove this DRM cost time because the game and assets need to be recompiled without this DRM system, most of the time even braking some checks.

So as a solution here and not spending time on development time, to just a piece of software from a “pirate” group. Although most of the time the group who made the crack never distributed the game as a torrent, some third party groups made bundle torrents where at one go you had the game and crack.