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Over at Joystiq, Alexander Sliwinski reports on a surprising statement from CD Projeckt Red CEO Marcin Iwinski on that studio's decision to abandon digital rights management protections on their future titles:
"Every subsequent game we will never use any DRM anymore, it's just over-complicating things," Iwinski said. His presentation was hinged on how the Polish publisher sold over a million copies of the game on a modest budget.
"We release the game. It's cracked in two hours, it was no time for Witcher 2. What really surprised me is that the pirates didn't use the GOG version, which was not protected. They took the SecuROM retail version, cracked it and said 'we cracked it' -- meanwhile there's a non-secure version with a simultaneous release. You'd think the GOG version would be the one floating around."
"DRM does not protect your game," Iwinski told Joystiq after the presentation. "If there are examples that it does, then people maybe should consider it, but then there are complications with legit users."
This is a welcome development, and one I hope (but doubt) more developers will begin to adopt.
Portal 2 developer, Valve, has been on the anti-DRM for a while now. Recent addition to the Forbes Billioinaire's list, Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director of Valve, has had choice words in the past for DRM:
"As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't)," he wrote. "We really really discourage other developers and publishers from using the broken DRM offerings, and in general there is a groundswell to abandon those approaches."
Other developers could do worse than imitate Valve. Unfortunately, many of the biggest studios are still freaked out about piracy and think that hampering the playability of their games even on non-pirated copies makes sense in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
