You might be able to prevent that (single player) app from accessing the Internet at all using a firewall. Of course they probably won't allow that, either.

I usually don't like the cracked version for games. Pirated executables are sketchy. Even if they work, you don't know what may have been added.

The point of modern PPC style advertising, yeah. But traditional advertising models (such as TV spots, billboards) are based on upfront payment for a given amount of time. They don't require the tracking aspects and the ad selection could be kept up to date via patches

It also would mean they can get ads in front of people playing offline and that they're much harder to block using traditional methods

I'm not saying this is the way they would go, but they don't have to go the PPC style route.