Late last month CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski estimated that for everyone who purchased a copy of their RPG The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, there were four to five that pirated the software. The developer has since mounted a legal campaign against these pirates, although it has assured the press it is only going after gamers who it is “100 percent sure have downloaded our game illegally.”
A TorrentFreak report states that since Iwinski’s initial statement on the privacy, thousands of BitTorrent users in Germany have been charged an average of €911.80 ($1187) for their illegal download, a figure which has yet to be confirmed outside of TorrentFreak’s findings. The website also states multiple illegitimate cases have been brought against people who claim to have never even heard of the game, a claim also unconfirmed as of this publication.
“We aren’t huge fans of any sort of DRM here at CD Projekt RED. DRM itself is a pain for legal gamers – the same group of honest people who decided that our game was worth its price, and went and bought it.” read a statement from CD Projekt, “We don’t want to make their lives more difficult by introducing annoying copy protection systems… We could introduce advanced copy protection systems which, unfortunately, punish legal customers as well. Instead we decided to give gamers some additional content with each game release, to make their experience complete.”
It continued, “However, that shouldn’t be confused with us giving a green light to piracy. We will never approve of it, since it doesn’t only affect us but has a negative impact on the whole game industry. We’ve seen some of the concern online about our efforts to thwart piracy, and we can assure you that we only take legal actions against users who we are 100 percent sure have downloaded our game illegally.”
(via Gamasutra)