Want to beat piracy? Drop DRM, CD Projekt says

The Witcher 3 has sold nearly 10m copies and launched on PC without any in-built anti-piracy measures. Which should tell you something, Marcin Iwinski argues.

Kotaku reports that the co-founder of developer CD Projekt and retailer GOG told an audience at InfoShare 2016 last month that winning favour with pirates did the game far more favours than trying to fight them.

We cannot force people to buy things. We can only convince them to do it. We totally believe in the carrot, not in the stick,” he said. [In] lower income countries, people just cannot afford a 50 dollar game. So maybe our price-point offering in a certain country wasn’t right. For example, we have lower prices in Russia. And there are many cases like that.

And funnily enough, the more we proceed this way, the more we see them again on forums and Reddit and whatnot, we see that there is a guy saying ‘hey where can I download Witcher 3: Wild Hunt from?’ And then there is 10 people bashing them, ‘Oh you f*cko, do not download the game. These guys are fair, they’re the only fair guys in the industry. You should go and buy it.’

I’ve seen many times, comments [that say] ‘Hey, I couldn’t afford the game when it was full price, but these guys are so fair, and they were never against us. They were always trying to do good, add a lot of value, give free DLC, give free content, that I bought the game from them when it was mid-price.’”