14 DAY TRIAL // CD Projekt Red, the developer behind the successful The Witcher role playing game series, has confirmed that all of its future projects won’t have any anti-piracy DRM solutions built into them.
The long running piracy debate saw another fresh installment at the beginning of the year, when CD Projekt Red, the studio behind the most recent The Witcher 2 RPG, said that DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems were only used to punish legal gamers, not pirates.
Now, in order to back up its words, the studio revealed through the voice of its CEO, Marcin Iwinski, during last week’s Game Developers Conference, that all future projects made by CD Projekt Red would no longer use any sort of DRM systems, like the SecuROM software that was employed in The Witcher 2.
"[On] every subsequent game we will never use any DRM anymore, it's just over-complicating things," Iwinski said, via Joystiq.
He exemplified his statement with The Witcher 2, which came out last year in both a standard version, with DRM, and a DRM-free one that appeared on Good Old Games. Pirates cracked the former in just two hours largely because people didn’t want to see SecuROM in the RPG.
"We release the game. It's cracked in two hours, it was no time for Witcher 2. What really surprised me is that the pirates didn't use the GOG version, which was not protected. They took the SecuROM retail version, cracked it and said 'we cracked it' -- meanwhile there's a non-secure version with a simultaneous release. You'd think the GOG version would be the one floating around."
Iwinski concluded by saying that DRM no longer protected a video game. While the studio is more than willing to see examples where it does, it’s confident in its decision to scrap such anti-piracy measures altogether.
With or without SecuROM, The Witcher 2 still managed to sell over 1 million copies. It’s now getting ready to see the release of its Enhanced Edition on the PC and, for the first time, on the Xbox 360 in April.