Piracy remains a hot topic in the gaming world, not only because it has a direct affect on the long term growth and development of the industry, but also because it is has a direct affect on the games we are playing now. There is no denying that piracy is rife, particularly if we look at PC gaming, and there are a multitude of opinions on how to curb it and promote growth in the game buyer’s market.

As a result, different publishers are enacting unique and varied solutions to the problem. Ubisoft has made a particularly bad name for itself by shipping recent PC games with DRM which requires gamers to be online at all times when playing games.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have independent Polish publisher CDProjekt, which ignores DRM altogether, insisting that gamers will pay for a product if they perceive it as valuable enough.

PCGamer recently conducted an interview with  CDProjekt founder and CEO Marcin Iwinski, in which Iwinski shares his thoughts on piracy and his company’s approach to selling PC games in a market where it is so prominent.

Look who's talking: Marcin Iwinski

One of the first statements he makes is one which echoes the sentiments of many gamers:

“DRM does not work and however you would protect it, it will be cracked in no time. Plus, the DRM itself is a pain for your legal gamers – this group of honest people, who decided that your game was worth the 50 USD or Euro and went and bought it. Why would you want to make their lives more difficult?”

It’s easy for us, the paying consumers to say that, but when a man whose own product has been pirated countless times agrees then it gives the argument real credibility. When asked how many times he believes The Witcher 2 was pirated, Iwinski had this to say:

“There are no stats available, but let’s make a quick calculation.”

“I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first 6-8 weeks there was around 20-30k ppl downloading it at the same time. Let’s take 20k as the average and let’s take 6 weeks. The game is 14GB, so let’s assume that on an average not-too-fast connection it will be 6 hours of download. 8 weeks is 56 days, which equals to 1344 hours; and with a 6 hour of average download time to get the game it would give us 224 downloads, then let’s multiply it by 20k simultaneous downloaders.”

Did you get all that?

(8 x 7 x 24) / 6 = 224 ; 224 x 20 000 = ?

“The result is roughly 4.5 million illegal downloads. This is only an estimation, and I would say that’s rather on the optimistic side of things; as of today we have sold over 1M legal copies, so having only 4.5-5 illegal copies for each legal one would be not a bad ratio. The reality is probably way worse.”

But that doesn’t change his view that DRM is not the solution, “In my almost 20 years in the industry, I have not seen DRM that really worked (i.e. did not complicate the life of the legal gamer and at the same time protect the game).

“We have seen a lot of different protections, but there are only two ways you can go: Either you use light DRM, which is cracked in no time and is not a major pain for the end-user, or you go the hard way and try to super-protect the game.”

“Yes, it is then hard to crack, but you start messing with the operation system, the game runs much slower and – for a group of legal gamers – it will not run at all. None of these solutions really work, so why not abandon it altogether?”

When discussing his proposed solution to the problem of piracy, Iwinski recalled his days of fighting piracy in Poland back in 1994, when it was unusual  for people to actually pay for games.

“We did not give up, but came up with new strategy: we started offering high value with the product – like enhancing the game with additional collectors’ items like soundtracks, making-of DVDs, books, walkthroughs, etc. This, together with a long process of educating local gamers about why it makes sense to actually buy games legally, worked. And today, we have a reasonably healthy games market.”

And this seems to be the exact approach which CDProjekt is taking now. The Witcher 2 standard edition shipped with a variety of extra cool goodies, and removing DRM built good-will among the PC gaming community.

As a result, The Witcher 2 managed to ship 1.5 million units, and that was without any copy protection measures.

Source: PCGamer