Way back in the early days of the Net, when we were all young, naive, had a full head of hair and pretty much every dynamic website out there was susceptible to SQL injections, I used to browse without an ad blocker, but with all the abuse in the form of pop-ups, pop-unders, page covering overlays, animated shit and even malicious payloads, I had to start blocking ads.

Never went back since.

It also protects your machine from any spyware in the original game, as it’s very easy to have the sandboxing deny network access beyond localhost.

Personally I run everything inside the sandbox with networking disabled.

In Linux, if you run games with Lutris, you can have them sandboxed with your sandboxing app of choice (personally I use firejail) by changing the “command prefix” option in the configuration for the game (or setting it as the default in the global Lutris configuration).

Also Lutris defaults to a different Wine instance per game, so Windows-specific malware would only ever affect the wine instance of that game.

So if you’re worried about pirated Windows games might contain Linux specific malware meant for when the game is running under Wine (as Wine is just an adaptor, not an emulator or sandboxing layer) you can go as crazy as you want in blocking what that executable can access, all fully under your control.

I’m running the games in Linux, using Lutris as a launcher with a default configuration that wraps them in a firejail sandbox (for anybody interested, you add firejail as the “command prefix” under Global Options or in the System Options of the game) which amongst other things blocks networking.

In fact I went and figure out how to do all that exactly because I wanted to run pirated games in Linux in a safe way and you can’t just rely on the lower probability of Windows games of having code that tries to determine if it’s being run with Wine and accesses Linux-specific functionality and files if it is.

PS: That firejail stuff also works for Linux native games (it just wraps whatever you’re running to start the game, be it Wine or directly the game Linux binary).