14 DAY TRIAL // The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings might have been one of the most high profile launches exclusive to the PC this year but it seems that with popularity also comes great loss, because the developers estimate that more than 4.5 million people pirated the game.
Marcin Iwinski, who is the Chief Executive Officer at CD Projekt, talked to PC Gamer about The Witcher 2 and said, “I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first six to eight weeks there was around 20-30k people downloading it at the same time.”
He added, “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 one million 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.”
It’s not clear how many of those 4.5 million people had the money to actually buy The Witcher 2 and chose to pirate it because the process was easy and how many would have never spent money on the game.
Iwinski says that adding Digital Rights Management solutions to a game is not a good way to drive back piracy because the cracks tend to appear at the same time as the game and the move ends up hurting paying customers most.
The executive believes that educating gamers about what piracy means for developers and for future projects is way better and has helped CD Project create a solid market for their titles on the PC.
The company says that it plans to launch the game on the Xbox 360 with new mechanics and new content and that it is working on two AAA games at the moment, both of which should be revealed before the end of 2013.