If anyone pirates The Witcher 3 I will personally find you and punch you in the mouth.

How awesome is this? Finally, a developer that seems to have our interests in mind and is looking at these issues in an intelligent way. Lets not fuck this up.

I like being trusted.

I like the way Marcin thinks, he gets why piracy occurs and why DRM only does more damage, he's thinking outside the box rather than being brutish about it.

This whole thing reminds me of GTA IV, which has FOUR layers of DRM if you buy it on Steam. SecuROM, Games For Windows Live, Rockstar Social Club, and Steam. Last time I decided to play GTA IV, I spent at least 30 minutes just getting the game to boot. Eventually I gave up, downloaded a crack and had the game up and running within 2 minutes. Absolutely preposterous. I contacted Rockstar about this ridiculous debacle and didn't even get a response.

I salute CD Projekt RED and support all that they stand for. I happily paid for The Witcher 2, and will be doing so again for The Witcher 3.

It's nice to see that there are some people out there who understand the piracy situation and the (non)effect of DRM.

@darkdragonmage99 said:

Well, if you stopped waving a bloody hatchet around, maybe they'd stand still long enough to hear your point.

I think I'm in love

;_;7

Ah fair enough, I take it you just sent him a single email with the entire list of above questions and then he replied in a single email?

What I don't get is that Steam is not DRM. Why do people keep saying Steam is DRM? You can buy plenty of games that do not require Steam to play after you download them. Oh, and before some of you say that just requiring Steam in the first place is DRM is like saying you need to log in to gog.com to download your titles.

Steam has Steamworks which has OPTIONAL DRM. They could choose not to use it at all. But they aren't. The only thing that makes sense as to why they would be doing this is to try and shine more of a light on the GoG version for the DRM-free crowd. Which is fine but this just wreaks of being sleezy though. I like CDPR and I loved The Witcher games and I am looking forward to part 3 and the upcoming Cyberpunk game but this is sort of bullshit.

Why are game journalists who should know better not picking up on this?

He mentioned it was an e-mail conversation.

@snail: Ah I must have missed that.

@chose: You're making counterpoints to claims I never made, and addressing none of the points I did make. Sounds about right.

I'll be getting the witcher 3 on gog.com on day 1 for sure. cheers.

Such a refreshing attitude and outlook and because of that, I bought Witcher 2 off GOG when it was released even though I didn't even have a PC that could run it back then!

Salient interview. Well done.

I buy everything on steam when I can, but lets be honest here, after a certain point the only way to play many games is to either buy them second hand or pirate them. Many, many, many, many games would be forever lost and forgotten if it wasn't for emulation and piracy. Sure, some stuff gets re-released on services like GOG and Virtual Console, but lots of good games are no longer available for purchase in ways that actually benefits the developer/publisher. I feel like without piracy vast amounts of gaming history would be lost and never be able to be enjoyed widely by younger gamers.

How is making a DRM-free version "giving in to pirates"?

Probably gonna buy and gift Witcher 2 again this holiday sale, great game and a great company.

Can't say I understand it, but you're certainly entitled to feel that way I suppose.

If any Development Studio in the Games industry deserves your hard earned cash it's these guys, a beacon of light in an increasingly greedy, corrupt industry.

What do you think it would be like if they uploaded a copy of their own game to pirate sites, but with several textures (which you wouldn't see until you've played the game for an hour or two) swapped with text that says "Please don't pirate our game!". I think that would be pretty funny, and wouldn't punish people who got the game from legitimate sources.

Likewise, it's good to know that wasn't ENTIRELY on them cause I also remember buying the Witcher 1 literally a DAY before the Enhanced Edition was announced. That game did NOT run well until that came along (which also added a LOT of content, re-recorded almost every voice sample, often with DIFFERENT actors, and, oh yeah, 100% FREE)

DRM is very similar to other restrictive regulations, like harsh gun laws and the like: it punishes the legal, legitimate and well-meaning customers and doesn't stop those that are willing to sidestep it anyway. In some cases, harsh DRM encourages more piracy and makes a company lose customer loyalty.

Piracy ultimately benefited the music industry by breaking up scummy practices by big labels and giving room to a broader spectrum of distribution. Music quality has blossomed in the past decade or so as well. I can see the same thing starting to happen already with games too. Not the piracy itself, but the response to it and the need for more flexibility, more transparency, easier access to the software and treating the customers with respect.

nice to see someone in the industry finally gets it.......... and when i say gets it, i mean they REALLY get it.....

That is a totally different discussion from the "regular" discussion about piracy. I remember I really really wanted to play Evil Genius a while ago. And there was no way at that point for me to actually play the game. I didn't pirate it but if anyone told me he did I would not be surprised nor would I judge it.

If I had pirated it I would have payed for the game as soon as it appeared on Steam/GOG though.

Pretty much this. Piracy is not cool, and any legal means to fight it should be explored, but never should the burden fall upon legitimate users. This right here is why I almost exclusively buy digital games DRM-free (GOG, Indie Game Stand and the like) and only buy full-price games on console/on disc. I don't feel punished for buying games this way, so that's how I spend my cash.

The problem with the game industry, much like the music industry before iTunes, is the core belief that everyone should be treated like a pirate. Remember the Sony rootkit fiasco a few years back? As long as that's the driving philosophy behind games' publishers, piracy will continue to be better for many games than legitimate purchase, and that's ass-backward.

I think it's weird how Patrick's questions get them to repeat themselves so much. But hey, I'm not interviewer. Maybe CBSi demands those word counts.

Why on earth should pirates have a better user experience than gamers who paid their hard earned money for our game?

Marcin Iwinski

And there it is.

I mean you can't stop piracy it will always be here.

A lot of Nintendo's business in remaking or re-releasing games and bringing back old characters is based on releases few people initially played, but the end result was a surge in popularity due to piracy.

A reason for piracy he missed their: the region-based overcharging for a downloaded copy of a game. There is no reason why it should cost me $40 more to download a game because I live in Australia compared to America.

Great games and great developers need to be supported. Definitely getting TW3