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Marcin Iwinski, the CEO at CD Projekt, has always been outspoken about his dislike for Digital Rights Management (DRM) on video games. He feels that DRM protection is usually fairly easy to circumvent and only punishes the people who obtain the game legally. Well, Iwinski is still holding fast to his anti-DRM stance, even though CD Projekt’s The Witcher 2 has been pirated more than 4.5 million times—and those numbers are probably pretty conservative. “This is only an estimation,” Iwinski told PC Gamer, “and I would say that’s rather on the optimistic side of things; as of today we have sold over 1M legal copies, so having only 4.5-5 illegal copies for each legal one would be not a bad ratio. The reality is probably way worse.” So, for every copy sold, there are probably five copies that were obtained illegally? Most developers would scramble to start developing a new DRM, but Iwinski wishes that more developers would follow his example. 
Is this something that will change anytime soon? Iwinski isn’t optimistic about that happening. “As funny as this might sound, DRM is the best explanation, the best ‘I will cover my ass’ thing,” he said. “I strongly believe that this is the main reason the industry has not abandoned it until today, and to be frank this annoys me a hell of a lot. You are asking, ‘So why is it taking so long for them to listen?’ The answer is very simple: They do not listen, as most of them do not care. As long as the numbers in Excel will add up they will not change anything.” There’s very little chance that the industry is going to start subscribing to Iwinski’s point of view. But I think pretty much every gamer on earth would probably agree with him. By Josh Engen |