But this is really the antithesis of what a zero-day originally was, which was a crack circulated on or even before the release day of software[0]. The Alto is 45 years old :)
Odd how words and phrases can change so much over a short period of time that they invert their meaning.
[0] that's what it meant in the early / mid 1990s when I was peripherally involved. Now it seems to mean 'zero days of notification to the vendor'.
I think 'zero days since a patch has been released' is probably more accurate.
And those old (~1995) WaReZ sites are the reason I distrusted javascript from the beginning
Personally, torrents fulfill my needs these days, I can't be bothered to Sneakernet, DDC or FXP anymore.
Let’s just call it 2¹⁴ days and be done with it.
It is because they got something in return: access to the private FTP servers used by the group, which means they get to download their releases before they appear anywhere else.
This is especially attractive to people who manage DDL or streaming sites which earn a lot of $$$ from intrusive/malicious ads...
It is also a big deal for private torrent tracker operators and/or uploaders. If you get Razor1911 releases before any other tracker, people will want to get in ;)
Today with digital distribution even if it's for patches only you don't care about the game going gold the DVD could contain a build that is utterly irrelevant pretty much every new install from disk requires a day 1 patch that can be often as large as downloading the whole from scratch (pretty much every console owner knows this, PC games also get a day one patch but digital distribution is a given for the PC market these days).
So zero-day for games at least isn't that important anymore, also DRM is harder to crack these games some games take months to crack, some don't get cracked at all, some rely on a weaken DRM version to be released (e.g. STEAM) down the line that can be cracked more easily.
For DVDs/BR today this also often happens you have full BR rips often weeks before the official release date, sometimes months just because they are already ready just waiting on the right time to go on sale or for some online distribution exclusivity deal to end.
Early builds that might not function outside of the internal environment aren't much of a deal the last leak I remember that got a scene release was probably the Doom 3 Alpha.
We'd then run some cassettes off that master to validate they loaded, some of the copy protection was picky about the duplication quality and speed. They'd then start production and the finished product would be on the shelves in a week or two at most.
It was a fun and very interesting time visiting all those places. I went up to Telford once and was stuck there for a while as there was a mastering problem and we had to play with the copy protection. Most of the times it was a place by the A4 near Chiswick/Hammersmith.
As someone who was a kid who actually cared about the games, it just seemed pointlessly tiresome to be worth it at that point.