14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the fact that The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings was released without any sort of Digital Right Management solution via the GOG digital distribution service, the most pirated version of the game was the retail one, which had heavy protection measures.
Guillaume Rambourg, the managing director at GOG, has stated that “Most people in the gaming industry were convinced that the first version of the game to be pirated would be the GOG version, while in the end it was the retail version, which shipped with DRM.”
Marcin Iwinski, the Chief Executive Officer at CD Projekt, added, “We were expecting to see the GOG.com version pirated right after it was released, as it was a real no-brainer. Practically anyone could have downloaded it from GOG.com and released it on the illegal sites right away, but this did not happen.
“My guess is, that releasing an unprotected game is not the real deal, you have to crack it to gain respect and be able to write: “cracked by XYZ.” How would “not cracked by XYZ, as there was nothing to crack” sound? A bit silly, wouldn’t it?”
Iwinki has also said that his own company does not see pirated versions of The Witcher II as lost sales and says that, in many ways, pirates treat illegally obtained copies of the game as a sort of extended demo and many of them go out and buy the game once they became interested in it and begin to appreciate the work of the development team.
The CD Projekt CEO says that, despite rampant piracy sales of the first Witcher, titles are still strong and the overall total is over the 2 million mark more than 5 years after the official launch.
The Witcher II was recently launched on the Xbox 360 and PC players can get their hands on the 2.0 version for free, getting revamped game mechanics and more quests.