“The travails of Diablo III have put digital rights management high on the hate list of many gamers – a position it rarely slips from, it must be said. In order to fight piracy (and protect the integrity of the new auction house, where players can sell their surplus loot to each other, with Blizzard taking a cut of every transaction), Diablo III insists on a constant Internet connection to play. So, when the servers were misbehaving during the game’s launch, early adopters could not even practise in the single-player mode.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings – copied an estimated 4.5 million times.
CD Projekt have had their own issues with piracy – according to their estimates, 4.5 million copies of their latest game have been circulated. Having abandoned DRM as a means of preventing piracy, they experimented briefly with the RIAA approach of sending letters to suspected pirates, but abandoned the strategy after a public backlash, despite maintaining that they could accurately identify pirated copies, and thus no legitimate player was being contacted.
There is an interesting detail to this story. Like all GOG.com games, the version of The Witcher 2 released in 2011 shipped without DRM – pirating it would have been little more complex than sharing the file. However, it was also published in the US as a boxed, on-disc game by Ubisoft. This version shipped with Ubisoft’s SecuROM copy protection. “Most people in the gaming industry were convinced that the first version of the game to be pirated would be the GOG version (as it was DRM-free), while in the end it was the retail version, which shipped with DRM.”
I asked GOG.com’s Managing Director, Guillaume Rambourg, to confirm not only that CD Projekt Red no longer used DRM, but that the GOG.com downloader used to download games sold through CD Projekt’s digital channel did not monitor usage or report back to an authentication or verification system.
We use no DRM and we never will. The fact that we have a download assistant has worried a few people because they’re afraid it’s the first step on the way to having an always-on client like some other distributors out there. We’ll never do that. Our download assistant has a very limited scope of information that it accesses. It knows your account login information, which it obviously needs that so it can download your games and let you know about any game updates or forum replies. It keeps track of the progress of your downloads. It checks individual “chunks” often during the download to make sure that the file you’re saving is not corrupted. And that’s it. There’s no authentication server. There’s no functions to sweep through your memory or your storage device looking for other active programs or data. There’s no bloatware or privacy invasion. It just helps you download games at incredibly quick speeds. That’s such a simple idea it almost sounds revolutionary, doesn’t it?
But why, then, would the DRM-free version of The Witcher 2 be ignored by pirates, when it was an open target? Marcin Iwinski, CEO of CD Projekt Red, responded:
You would have to ask someone at the pirate group which cracked it, but I have to admit it was a big surprise. We were expecting to see the GOG.com version pirated right after it was released, as it was a real no-brainer. Practically anyone could have downloaded it from GOG.com (and we offered a pre-download option) and released it on the illegal sites right away, but this did not happen. My guess is, that releasing an unprotected game is not the real deal, you have to crack it to gain respect and be able to write, “cracked by XYZ.” How would “not cracked by XYZ, as there was nothing to crack” sound? A bit silly, wouldn’t it? The illegal scene is pretty much about the game and the glory: who will be the first to deliver the game, who is the best and smartest cracker. The DRM-free version at GOG.com didn’t fit this too well.
It’s perverse, but perhaps the fun of file sharing – especially when done for status and bragging rights rather than serious financial gain – is in frustrating efforts by content owners to stop it. Within two hours of its release Ubisoft’s DRM was cracked. Meanwhile, GOG.com’s DRM-free version hid in plain sight, too tempting and easy a target. Ironically, GOG.com is now publishing UbiSoft’s Assassin’s Creed back catalogue – without DRM.
So, DRM is nothing more than an incitement to crack, and 4 million copies of the Witcher games have been passed around Do these represent lost sales, or would file sharers not have bought the game? How do you see the future of DRM in games generally? Iwinski responded at length:
First of all let me dispel the myth about DRM protecting anything. The truth is it does not work. It’s as simple as that. The technology which is supposed to protect games against illegal copying is cracked within hours of the release of every single game. So, that’s wasted money and development just to implement it. But that’s not the worst part. DRM, in most cases, requires users to enter serial numbers, validate his or her machine, and be connected to the Internet while they authenticate – and possibly even when they play the game they bought. Quite often the DRM slows the game down, as the wrapper around the executable file is constantly checking if the game is being legally used or not. That is a lot the legal users have to put up with, while the illegal users who downloaded the pirated version have a clean–and way more functional!–game. It seems crazy, but that’s how it really works. So if you are asking me how do I see the future of DRM in games, well, I do not see any future for DRM at all.
(Another comparison might be the sharing of movies. With films, the DVD copy protection is broken, and the DVD can be ripped to form an almost perfect copy – unlike the shoddy cameraphone-recorded knock-offs the unskippable warnings at the beginning of a DVD warn consumers of. File sharers even considerately remove the unskippability of these warnings, making watching a pirate version potentially more convenient than a paid-for copy.)
CD Projekt’s position – that DRM is useless and damages the experience of legitimate buyers – is shared by others, such as the Free Software Foundation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Let’s take a look at the music industry. First all music files were protected with various systems, that essentially meant that the legal user had more complicated access to his legal purchases than a pirate. Unsurprisingly, it was a major hurdle for the digital music business, as people hate complication. So, they either did not buy at all, or they pirated. Only when iTunes introduced a DRM-free solution did we really see digital music sales start to take off, and that’s what became the industry standard.
The games industry is slowly having that same realization, and I think that sooner rather than later we will see online-only games (where DRM makes no sense) and offline games with no DRM. We will eventually leave DRM behind.
Coming back to The Witcher 2: we have indeed estimated the number of pirated copies at 4.5M units, although it’s just an estimate – and by now it’s probably more. However this number doesn’t represent lost sales. It really puzzles me how serious software companies can consider each pirated copy to be a lost sale. Maybe it looks nice in an official report to say how threatening pirates are, but it is extremely far from the truth.
(Lest we forget – and I never get tired of this fact – the RIAA, in its case against LimeWire, originally estimated the losses caused by file sharers using the service as up to $75 trillion – that is, more money than exists in the world).
I would rather say that a big part of these 4.5M+ pirated copies are considered a form of trial version, or even a demo. Gamers download [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][pirate copies] because it’s easy, fast, and, frankly, costs nothing. If they like the game and they start investing the time, some of them will go and buy it. This is evident in the first Witcher, where the total sales are 2.1M units at present and the game is still doing well, although it is already 5 years old.
There are plenty of reasons why gamers do not buy a full price new game in the first place. For some of them it is the price. They simply can’t afford it, or maybe they did not hear about the game (its so easy to download an illegal version from torrents that gamers often download all the new releases in bulk and then later on get around to checking out what they’ve gotten). Maybe the PR and marketing campaign was not convincing enough.
All in all, our job is to make each of our games a must-have. We have spent lots of time and effort to prepare the best offering for both retail and digital. We do the same while developing the game, as the only thing which can increase our sales is the quality of the overall experience the gamer has. We want them to think something like, “Wow this game is really great. I spent 40-50 great hours with it and I want to have it in my collection; it would be embarrassing not to buy it.” Whether they buy it in full price, mid-price or maybe even budget is less important. We want them to have the legal version and became fans of the Witcher franchise, as when the next game comes they will be hooked and they will go and buy it on day one.
This interview was oddly prescient in its timing, bearing in mind the revolts against Blizzard locking players out of every part of Diablo III but the character selection screen at launch
This joins complaints about Electronic Arts’ Origin download system giving itself the right to monitor more of its customers’ computer activity than it should, and revolts against Ubisoft’s restrictive DRM practises, which may help to explain the glee with which its DRM is cracked (Ubisoft, it must be said, has gone on record as saying always-on DRM is, from their perspective, a success. Players locked out of their games during server maintenance in February of this year may disagree with that assessment. Protest against DRM from players is vociferous, and unsurprising. It is more unusual to see a notable player in both game development and publishing take the same stance – many moderates suggest DRM could be applied during the first few weeks or months, when both sales and piracy are at a maximum, and then be patched out, for example. Nonetheless, CD Projekt’s candour is refreshing, and their principle admirable – although, they would argue, it is not costing them money. In fact, it is saving money otherwise spent on the coding and licensing of useless, quickly cracked DRM. Making it the best kind of principle – a profitable one.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is available now, from Ubisoft, Namco Bandai and CD Projekt Red.”
Source: Forbes
Aaaaaaaand back to Diablo III login screen…
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