Anti-piracy measures just end up hurting the legal gamer

Dec 2, 2011 08:14 GMT  ·  By

CD Projekt Red, the developer of The Witcher series, has just added its voice to the ongoing piracy debate that’s been rekindled recently, and says that developers and publishers should just forget about using harsh DRM (Digital Rights Management) software, as it’s going to be hacked in no time and just ends up upsetting legal gamers.

Ubisoft cause quite a stir last week when one of its game producers accused PC gamers that they just want versions of games for their platform in order to pirate it.

Since then, plenty of companies have made statements about piracy, from Steam to Good Old Games, and now, CD Projekt Red’s CEO, Marcin Iwinski has also shared his thoughts with PC Gamer.

The Polish executive believes that DRM software just isn’t enough to prevent piracy, as practically any system can be hacked by pirates, so it’s up to developers to make a game that people don’t want to get illegally.

"From the very beginning our main competitors on the market were pirates," he said. "The question was really not if company X or Y had better marketing or better releases, but more like ‘How can we convince gamers to go and buy the legit version and not to go to a local street vendor and buy a pirated one?’ We of course experimented with all available DRM/copy protection, but frankly nothing worked."

While he admitted recently that more than 4.5 million copies of The Witcher 2 were downloaded illegally, he says that, by increasing the value of the product with rich special editions and by supporting it with multiple updates, plenty of people still bought he game.

In the end, Iwinski says that DRM is just a relic of older times and just serves to complicate the life of a legal gamer.

"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?"

The parent company of the Red studio, CD Projekt, also owns Good Old Games, a digital distribution service that specializes in selling games without any sort of DRM.