Interview The Witcher 2 DRM and Piracy

But who cares about how many people pirated the game as long as the sales numbers are fine?

Because the sales could have been better.

Yeah, looks like people stole from CDProject safe depo in Swiss bank 4.5 mln x 50 $ = 225 mln $. Kotick would be outraged

How much better could they really have been? From 4 million torrents(bullshit exaggeration of course, as you just take a look at the most popular private tracker numbers and take a glance at TPB and other public torrent sites to see that there would NEVER be that many downloads of this game) I doubt that even 10% would have considered buying it. You look around and there's still many people who barely have heard of The Witcher, so where are all these millions of pirates of this game?

Yes there were losses, and yes there would be losses regardless of DRM or no DRM, but no point exaggerating how much is lost.

Might as well have pulled a random number out of his ass.

At least he realizes that Nazi DRM is not a solution.

From how he sounds in the whole interview, he doesn't seem to really give a fuck. Just a rough estimation of the numbers. What's very nice is that in a way he acknowledges that illegal download =/= lost sales:

Sounds bro to me, or? Also, funny how he mentions Excel guys responsible for this DRM bullshit. Most of the developers/publishers in public interviews just shit meaningless slogans out their mouths about how DRM is helping them (though every fucking blind man and his dog can see that it just doesn't work).

Since CDProjekt is behind GOG, it would make absolutely no sense for him not to disparage the effectiveness of DRM.

I like the optimistic outlook on how piracy improved the sales instead dwelling on "lost" sales. But I'm not sure I agree with his assessment of TW2's quality and the "purchase after demoing"-rate he derives from that

This is the worst calculation ever.

and another thing. .i have never ever, im my entire life or dreams downloaded something like 14 GB in 6 hours from torrent and i have 4 Gb/s DSL.

P.s. I just want to mention as well that i didnt download TW2 in anycase and ....

4.5 mils illegal downloads my ass

You know, if they sold the game to those 4.5 million guys for 1$ each, that's still some pretty good income.

As a gameplayer who have yelled yaaarrgh since the early 90s, I think the main problem with me not buying legal copies even now that I have good income, is probably laziness. I just find it easier to go TPB and search for a torrent and start download it, even though it's more troublesome in the long run because I must fiddle with the game and sometimes even my PC to get the game running, and need to find proper cracks in current and future versions, and I can't have awesome only achievements.

Although I do like buying hard game copies over the internet now, internet shopping is perfect for lazy men like me.

BTW I've bought a legal copy TW2 AFTER torrented and played it till chapter 2.

Why should I pay if I can get it for free?

Which brings us to what may be the ultimate solution to piracy. Come up with a storage medium much larger than a DVD, fill your game with tons of uncompressed fluff, and sell it on that. Let's see the pirates download 100GBs per game.

Of course, that would also fuck up legal digital distribution...

I don't think it would solve anything.

Anyone know how those piracy ratios compare to some other AAA game released recently, especially those with shitty DRM?

14 GB in 6 hours... lol

For me that would take about a day to torrent. ANd plus at release it would've been a lot worse, due to poor seeder/leecher ratio. Divide his number by 4 or so, then you've got more accurate pseudo estimation results.

14GB in 6Hrs is ~680K/s, seen better than that, especially with thousands of peers.
BTW, 6Gb DSL, really?

edit: switched b for B

I don't think that's going to work at all, they already have rips for PC games. Some console games do this too and hackers just scrub the crap and distribute it in a manageable size.

That depends on whether Internet speeds would eventually catch up with those sizes.
I remember that when games started coming out on CD-ROM, and had both floppy and CD versions, the CD versions would often have the copy protection removed! The developers didn't believe the data on the CDs would be duplicated.
And for a while it made sense, because burners were extremely uncommon and hard drives capacities were at most a gig or two.

here is what you can see if you have some kind of IP blocking program/block list(when you connect to RPG codex):

-CD-Projekt:70.84.191.74:80
so is this a CD-Projekt site?

70.84.191.74 Server Details
IP address:
70.84.191.74
Server Location:
Houston, TX in United States
Zip Postal Code: 77002 Latitude: 29.7523 Longitude: -95.367
ISP:
THEPLANET.COM INTERNET SERVICES

-Verestar:213.244.183.199:80
anti peer 2 peer company,monitoring file sharing
Whois:
ISP: Level 3 Communications
Organization: EXTREME-NL
Hosted in: Netherlands
1 Hosts on this IP address


-China:184.75.248.104.80
184.75.248.104 Whois
184.75.248.104 Website Information
184.75.248.104 Server Details
IP address:
184.75.248.104
Server Location:
Houston, TX in United States
ISP:
Elvsoft Corp.

I am not a computer expert so I am wondering what this all means(CD-Projekt and that torrent sneaking company).For the record I am not using torrents(and never was torrenting program installed on this system) for me these blocklists provide just an additional layer of security(on top of noscript,ghostery,zone alarm,better security,superantispyware,mailwarebytes,avast,spybot search and destroy etc.).

He lives in a high piracy, low income country, so he doesn't have delusions about millions of people out there being able to afford more than a small fraction of the stuff they download. And he probably had many occasions to see pirates switching to buying originals when their incomes increased.
I knew several people who were "why buy it when it's available for free" who suddenly started buying originals when they have finished studies and got a stable above-average income.

Make the prices and the content reasonable.

BROS I WOULD LOVE TO SEE ACTUAL RESEARCH ON SOFTWARE PIRACY

I WOULD AGREE THAT A LARGE PERCENTAGE WOULD BE GAMES THAT WOULD NOT BE PURCHASES ANYWAYS EITHER BECAUSE THE PERSON HAS NO MONEY OR THEY JUST TRY EVERYTHING OUT FOR FREE OR THEY ARE USED TO PIRATING EVERYTHING

I WONDER WHAT THE REAL NUMBERS ARE FOR UBISOFTS SHIT AND IF THERE SALES INCREASED WITH THEIR NEW SHIT I DOUBT IT

IVE ONLY BOUGHT ONE PC GAME OVER 10 DOLLARS IN THE LAST FEW YEARS SO FUCK IT I JUST AM NOT BOTHERED I HAVE TORRENTED GAMES IN THE PAST THEY WERE OLDER AND I DID HAVE TO SPEND A BUNCH OF TIME LEARNING ABOUT HOW TO GET THEM TO RUN RIGHT BUT AFTER THE INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT I COULD FIGURE OUT MYSELF EASIER

:?

I agree, though to be perfectly honest, for most games, the price is already pretty reasonable. Budgets these days are colossal, bigger than many films in the biggest cases, and yet games have a fraction of the market films do... you just can't expect to pay $10 for a brand-new game the same way you can with a movie. Yes, sometimes profits are huge, but for most games that only do a million or two copies, recouping that $20-30 million dollar investment is certainly not going to happen when you're selling your games so cheap. Even if you say sales go up, I don't think that's a sure thing. If publishers started charging $10 a pop for games, yes, you'd see a massive explosion in sales... for the first few months, or a year or two. But once that became the norm, I don't think you'd see those sales sustaining, at least not enough to make up for the price drop. Meanwhile, pirates would start saying "well iPhone games are 99 cents, why isn't yours?" or they'd find some other excuse to pirate anyway, because in the end piracy isn't usually about ideology, it's about the fact that paying nothing at all is a better deal than paying anything at all.