http://www.gamespot.com/news/witcher-3-drm-free-6406393?

"We are trying to get rid of DRM," game designer Maciej Szczesnik said. "If someone wants to pirate a game, eventually he will."

"Which is bad, of course," managing director Adam Badowski added. "But you can't do anything about it, so. We want to give the best user experience possible. When we removed DRM, people on those torrents were actually asking people not to download our game, because we [weren't using DRM]."

And again Red shows up all the other devs by being awesome. Witcher 2 great game. Even an amazing port to the 360

CD Projekt Red is probably the most consumer-friendly developer/publishing group in gaming right now. And I love them for it.

I wish more developers would think like this. Pirates will always find a way around DRM and you are just ruining the experience for everyone who pays for your products by including it.

The only way to stop piracy is to offer them a better alternative and we're starting to see a lot of pirates swap to using services like Spotify, Netflix and even Steam simply because they make it so easy for the consumer to access the stuff they want.

I think lower prices for games is helping. Sure there are some 60 dollar games still, but they are more rare now, and it usually doesn't take long for a game to drop to 40 bucks.

The dudes at Paradox have a similar ethos to this. Why provide a shittier service to your fans when a pirate is still gonna pirate it with or without your shitty drm. People still pirate the shit out of console games. People will ALWAYS find a way. You may as well make your games user friendly for the guys who buy it.

I love CDproject for this, wish more devs would pay attention. I also expect the same with Cyberpunk 2077.

CDPR continues to win the developer/consumer relationship contest.

You know it's funny, since DRM never ever works, and games get pirated anyway, I would love to see all the money people throw into that go into marketing campaigns designed to make pirates feel like shit about themselves.

Given that they own and run GOG.com, this is no surprise.

The irony is that EA allowed Wing Commander and System Shock 2 to be put onto GOG...yet they are the company that created Origin, which has caused nothing but crazy issues with SimCity because of always-online DRM. The irony indeed...

CD Projekt is one of the few studios where I'll just buy every game that they put out. The "The Witcher" games are amazing and they support their products like no other studio.

That wouldn't work. For a lot of them pirating is a matter of economics. A case of I can't afford versus I want. Yeah yeah I know, "if you can't afford it don't pirate it" and blah blah. The truth is that when you're living in a situation where virtually everything is "I can't afford so I can't have" you tend to not give a shit about piracy so much. Doesn't excuse the behaviour, but a smear campaign against pirates would only serve to reinforce the "us versus them" notion instead of appealing to the pirate's better nature and winning them over through conversion.

People have said DRM never works for years, well, actively attacking pirates doesn't work, either. The best solution is the one illustrated in the OP - not giving a crap and making sure the paying customer is well satisfied. Pirates will see that and feel kinda bad about what they do. If they can pitch in cash to pay for the goods they will, and if they can't they'll continue to feel bad. Sounds like a win-win to me.

@oldirtybearon: Oh I don't propose it to end piracy or anything. I'd want to reinforce the notion of us vs. them. They should feel unwelcome.

All we've really learned is that shit DRM (which is 99% of it) doesn't work. Diablo 3 was all DRM and sold 12 million copies. Diablo 3 would not have sold 12 million copies if it had been easily piratable. It can still be effective if you're prepared to build the whole game around it, but if you're not gonna do that then you might as well just not bother at all.

CDPR are also in the enviable position of needing to sell way less copies of their games than an equivalent studio in the US would need to (due to their wage bill being, what... ~70% lower?), which makes it slightly easier to be blasé about piracy.

I gotta say the whole "I pirate cause i don't got no money" argument is kinda bullshit for most pirates. Chances are those people if they had money probably wouldn't have bought the game anyway. People who pirate games have no value for the game in question and use that excuse as a way to make them seem like they're justified in their actions, but in reality they're just stealing the game. People in the early 2000s to present didn't just pirate music cause they didn't have money for a 99 cent song. They pirated it because they didn't value the band or buying was too much of a hassle. The same way the majority of people don't value porn enough to actual pay a monthly amount for it.

Edit: And don't take that as I'm accusing you of defending pirates just sayin.