Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Installing apps in Windows is a privileged process. This keeps the average user from corrupting a system.

The only users that can install apps are ones with Install Apps permission (I forget what it's actually called). Anyone in the Admin group has this. The group Users does not.

In a business/domain environment, very few people get local admin rights. For a home user best practice would be to run as a User or at most Power User, and only do admin level stuff when logged in as an Admin.

No one does this, of course. (I certainly don't, even though I know better. It's just easier to not do risky things and maintain backups).

Games often write to Program Files, system-wide redistributables, or shared folders. VC++ runtimes, DirectX, .NET, PhysX installers all require admin.

Repack scripts are usually written to “just work” everywhere, so they have the stuff mentioned above built in. Or maybe fitgirl is just lazy and asks for admin even if it is not strictly needed.

There is definitely a risk of malware etc. when pirating, so you are not dumb to be wary.

Ideally you'd install the game in a VM first and run some virus/malware check on the whole VM afterwards.

I'm not sure, but this has me wondering how this works in Proton. I've installed plenty of fitgirl repacks through proton which worked very well.

Looks like Wine just acts like UAC is enabled and allowed, but still runs with the same privileges: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ#head-c9e6502ad636315e905d07f7e44594757a6738e3%3A%7E%3Atext=Should+I+run+Wine+as+root

As of Wine 9.4, Wine programs run as a limited user by default, but will automatically and silently elevate themselves if necessary (in the same situations that Windows would spawn a UAC prompt), at which point they will report administrator privileges while still running as the same Unix user.

Some installers write to the protected "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)" folders. These are special folders requiring elevated permissions. (This is why a lot of modern programs install to your user folder or AppData instead).

Unfortunately, these same permissions also allow writing to OS files. It's good to be wary. You may be interested in a Sandbox program (I use Sandboxie). Someone else here can tell me if this is unnecessary or not useful in general.

You can right click and remove the requirement to run as admin on the exe. I have done this on a few releases without any issues but it might not work for some other releases

If you're using Windows and there's critical stuff on your system, you should be worried about security because of Windows itself, regardless of fitgirl repacks.

I can't answer for sure, but admin privileges could have something to do with:

• Maybe overriding DRM functionality
• Maybe overriding limitations on what system resources can be accessed/controlled without the right developer's signature (so the game can go fullscreen, change resolution settings, etc)
• Maybe stealing your data or reporting you for piracy, especially if the authorities or AI malware or something had recently compromised the "fitgirl repacks" identity before the repack was released - can reduce risk by setting a minimum time e.g. 2 years before you'll use a torrent, or only installing on air-gapped systems or something