Exploits and groupthink are a thing. You take one ego, copy it a thousand times, and aside from the potential stress that can place on forks, this means you will solve the same problem the same way 1000 times, and the same trick to beat them will work 1000 times. It would require dedicated work to make the forks diverge so they actually do things differently - which is not something people buying shady Egos from Nine Lives tend to have the time or resources for. At that stage, high level single fork-hiving is basically like using an AI - so why not pirate those instead they have way less legal protections over-all. Also, no, you can't do steam for Egos. The size of a complete human mind plus extras is large even by EP standards, the time to download a complete Ego is a significant increase over a normal data transmission. Since Egos are people, illegal distribution of them is kind of a big deal - this means you'd need to set up darknets, run darkcasting rigs and so on - which those groups do - but I'm pretty sure they don't run them constantly sucking up bandwidth to keep people updated. That draws resources and attention - it's not just like torrenting things. Also, lightspeed lag. As for why [i]soul thieves[/i] don't run a better business, well, they're criminals. You want their services you kind of have to do it on their terms. Or else. Having had this discussion a couple times, I see Ego-trading/forknapping probably has like three layers of business: 1 - When you need volume of labor, and you need it fast and no questions asked. Can't jump through the legal hoops to arrange a bunch of indenture contracts or don't want to pay out at the end? Groups like Nine Lives can provide heaps of Egos with no skills or general classes of skills. They do this with no red tape and no paper trail. 2 - When you need a specific set of skills, and you need it fast an no questions asked. Basically the same as above, but with high-skill labor. You don't need a stable of pit fighters or a cube-farm of software programmers, you need an expert in a particular subject... and you really don't want to pay him a salary or give him tenure or whatever. A lot of these two is probably done by shiftier hypercorps who don't like a lot of public eyes on their projects and try to help their bottom line, and other criminal organizations who can't exactly tell the local government "Yeah, we want to buy a dozen egos and import them to be prostitutes or cage-match fighters, but we're not going to pay them or move them out or anything because that's not our style". And you don't jump into this game on your own because Nine Lives is established and does terrible things to you. 3 is when you require information specific to an Ego you can't obtain legally. Sure, this can include pulling skillsofts or XPs, but just knowledge is super valuable too. Need to talk to a guy who was in a place? Maybe Nine Lives has him on ice. Or knows somebody who used to know him. All kinds of stuff like that. Information like that is hard to simply extract and distill from an Ego, and not entirely desired to be copied or circulated. Or it simply doesn't matter how many copies you have. This is probably an infrequent but big money maker for groups like Nine Lives. Copying an Ego on your own might dilute the value, make it easier for people to get hold of that person. But if they're a big score, a whale, then maybe it's good you've only got one of him lying around in a stack - you can say that's the last surviving copy.