Deep Silver Volition, LLC (formerly Parallax Software Corporation and Volition, Inc.) was closed on August 31, 2023.

Saint Row III will still attempt to connect to some of their services they used for game verification and stats tracking. In this case, the moment Saints Row III is started, the game will attempt to connect to agoragames.com (Wayback Machine Snapshot)[web.archive.org] which cannot be reached (anymore), giving the user a 403 Forbidden error.

Setting Steam to "Offline Mode" prevents the game from freezing up, but will also disable achievements and other Steam features for the game.

Thankfully, we can bypass these connection attempts and still get all the benefits of online activity by editing a single file on our computer.

• Saint Row III must be installed via Steam
  
• You must have a working text editor

In order for the game to become playable again, the domain the game is attempting to reach to verify stats must be mapped to a different IP address that can actually be reached. The go-to IP address for this is the localhost.

1. Open the "Run" window by pressing + R
   
2. Enter the following file path¹:
   C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
3. Right-click the "hosts" file and choose to open it with your text editor.
   
4. Paste the following code below the other lines following the same pattern. Please make sure that the code you are pasting has its own line:
   127.0.0.1 sr3.hydra.agoragames.com
5. Save the file.

Your file should now look something like this. Please note that you may or may not have already existing entries in that list that can look different from these.



In order to save the changes, Notepad (or the text editor you chose) must have elevated permissions. Notepad++ will prompt you to run it as an administrator if it detects that it cannot save the file. The standard text editor that comes with Windows lacks this feature and will not save the file. See the editorial comment in the first section if you are not using Notepad++.



¹) In case you changed the letter of your OS drive, please adjust it in the pasted path as well.

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By editing the "hosts" file, you are telling Windows to route to the IP 127.0.0.1 (or localhost) whenever it comes across the domain "sr3.hydra.agoragames.com" (which is no longer reachable). localhost is reachable, since it's your current machine, and therefore will report a success to the game. The game will now think that a connection to the statistics server has been established and thus will no longer make connection attempts. Those connection attempts are the cause for the game freezing up. You can find out more about it here[en.wikipedia.org].