CD Projekt's Tom Ohle said in an interview with softpedia that they don't believe in punishing their legitimate customer and would prefer to add value to their games than implementing punitive DRM. And I quote:
“Piracy happens. Our goal is to provide as much value to paying customers as possible; the Enhanced Edition was basically like a Collector’s Edition of a game at a standard price point. Rather than spending all our time and effort punishing people who get the game illegally, we want to reward those who legitimately buy the games. Piracy hurts a lot of companies, and there are a few companies that have embraced a progressive stance on the issue… make loyal fans out of your customers and they’ll pay for your games.”
His stance on DRM is admirable however it has to be noted that CD Projekt is now publishing games themselves and run GOG(Good Old Games). They profit from the negative press that publisher like EA and Ubisoft gets for employing Securom.
It also has to be said the CD Projekt may have the advantage of relatively cheaper cost of developing games since the cost of hiring programmers in eastern European countries is very low considered to North America or Central Europe hence their strategy of just putting more content for the price of a regular game may be viable for them.
Source : http://news.softpedia.com/news/Witcher-Developer-Talks-About-Piracy-100921.shtml
I don't really understand what he means by that, unless it's just a rehash of what Stardock does: make periodic and value-added patches available for download only to legitimate owners of the games, while basically allowing the base game to be DRM-free.
ReplyDeleteYou could think of the EE upgrade being made as a free download to folks who had purchased the original version as something similar, but I haven't seen CD Projekt doing much else in that respect.
Yes something similar to that. I think he also meant that the price of their game is a lot cheaper than many other games because of the amout of content available for something that is priced like a standard edition.
ReplyDeleteWhich doesn't reduce piracy. He is just ignoring them.