Digital Rights Management (DRM) does nothing to stop piracy according to CEO of The Witcher 2 developer CD Projekt, Marcin Iwinski.
"From the very beginning our main competitors on the market were pirates," he said. "The question was really not if company x or y had better marketing or better releases, but more like "How can we convince gamers to go and buy the legit version and not to go to a local street vendor and buy a pirated one?
"We of course experimented with all available DRM/copy protection, but frankly nothing worked."
Iwinski is strongly of the opinion that more value in games will defeat piracy, with added incentives such as limited editions and soundtracks making retail purchases more appealing to the casual consumer.
"In any case, I am not saying that we have eliminated piracy or there is not piracy in the case of TW2.
"DRM does not work and however you would protect it, it will be cracked in no time," said Iwinski.
"In my almost 20 years in the industry, I have not seen DRM that really worked (i.e. did not complicate the life of the legal gamer and at the same time protect the game). We have seen a lot of different protections, but there are only two ways you can go: Either you use light DRM, which is cracked in no time and is not a major pain for the end-user, or you go the hard way and try to super-protect the game.
"Yes, it is then hard to crack, but you start messing with the operation system, the game runs much slower and - for a group of legal gamers - it will not run at all. None of these solutions really work, so why not abandon it altogether?"
Source: PC Gamer
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