CD Projekt Red Against DRM

During GDC today, CEO of Projekt Red Marcin Iwinski announced that the team who created the Witcher franchise would no longer take part in the usage of digital rights management to ward off piracy.


”Every subsequent game we will never use any DRM anymore, it’s just over-complicating things.” said Iwinski. The trend of DRM usage has become very popular over the past two years due to rising piracy, and to many companies, this usage is the ‘magic pill’ to cure said piracy. However, its legitimacy and worthiness has been questioned by many.

“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.”

“DRM does not protect your game. If there are examples that it does, then people maybe should consider it, but then there are complications with legit users.”

Does this mean the industry should lie down and take piracy without a fight? Hopefully not, but it’s looking like DRM may not be the cure we were looking for.

Via Joystiq