Digital Rights Management is often thought as the best answer to the question of PC game piracy. CD Projekt, creator of the popular "Witcher" series, disagrees. The studio revealed in an interview this week that despite its latest game "Witcher 2" being pirated some 4.5 million times, it has no plans to change its tune on the controversial anti-piracy measure.
During an interview with PC Gamer, CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwinski provided a convoluted, if insightful explanation on how he arrived at the immense figure.
"I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first six-to-eight weeks there was around 20,000-30,000 people downloading it at the same time," explained Iwinski. "Let's take 20,000 as the average and let's take six weeks. The game is 14GB, so let's assume that on an average not-too-fast connection it will be six hours of downloading. Six weeks is 56 days, which equals to 1344 hours; and with six hours of average download time to get the game it would give us 224 downloads."
Multiply that by the 20,000 average downloaders and it totals nearly 4.5 million unpaid copies, he concluded, adding that his "optimistic estimation" stands in stark contrast to the studio selling just over 1 million legitimate copies of the title.
Fuzzy math notwithstanding, the executive remained ardently opposed to DRM.
"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," said Iwinski. "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."
The problem with the latter, he continued, is that it negatively impacts legit consumers. "None of these solutions really work, so why not abandon it altogether," he posited.
The full interview can be read here.
