By Kyle Orland
In the never-ending battle between software pirates and PC game makers, Polish "The Witcher 2" publisher CD Projekt Red has come down firmly against the kind of invasive digital rights management (DRM) protections favored by many game makers.
But that doesn't mean the publisher is willing to simply allow illegal copies of its games to flourish online. The company recently confirmed it has been contacting thousands of alleged German pirates demanding penalties of over $1185?for their ill-gotten games.
"As you know, we aren't huge fans of any sort of DRM here at CD Projekt Red," the company told industry site Eurogamer. "DRM itself is a pain for legal gamers ??the same group of honest people who decided that our game was worth its price, and went and bought it. We don't want to make their lives more difficult by introducing annoying copy protection systems."
"However, that shouldn't be confused with us giving a green light to piracy," the company continued. "We will never approve of it, since it doesn't only affect us but has a negative impact on the whole game industry.
Piracy has become a major problem for PC game publishers, and "The Witcher 2" hasn't been immune from the trend. CD Projekt Red CEO and Co-founder?Marcin?Iwinski recently estimated the game saw at least 4.5 million illegal downloads via BitTorrent, compared to?roughly a million legitimate sales.
Despite those figures, Iwinski said at the time he still doesn't think technical DRM solutions to stop piracy are worthwhile. Such solutions always end up either too light, and therefore easy for pirates to circumvent, or else so invasive they get in the way of enjoyment by legitimate customers, Iwinski said.
It's a valid concern?? publishers including EA and Ubisoft have faced vocal customer backlash for piracy-prevention schemes that require a persistent internet connection during play or that install harmful, hard-to-remove rootkits on players' systems.
But where technical measures fail, CD Projekt Red seems more than willing to try out legal measures instead, even though its fully aware such efforts may hurt the company's image.?"We've seen some of the concern online about our efforts to thwart piracy, and we can assure you that we only take legal actions against users who we are 100 per cent sure have downloaded our game illegally," the company told Eurogamer.
It's an interesting piracy-fighting balancing act, and one that game-makers of all stripes are going to have to address if they want to take part in the PC game market.
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Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on?Twitter?or at his personal website,?KyleOrland.com.
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