CD Projekt RED - DRM Policy

Tragos said:

I will buy the witcher 2 no matter what .
If it has a bad DRM i will use a crack to erase it .
I don't get why all this fuzz with stupid protections , long live skidrow and realoaded.
DRM is NOT a reason to pirate a game .

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I fairly sure that cracking a game is illegal, regardless of your motivation...why should you have to resort to illegal means to play a game you bought? Publishers must be made to see that they exist to serve us, not the other way around. Unfortunately the game devs are the people who suffer, but there are publishers who do not use such DRM - and they will get my business. BUT the more people who buy games with unacceptable DRM, the harder it is to convince companies to stop since they will simply point to their sales figures.

booboo said:

I fairly sure that cracking a game is illegal, regardless of your motivation…why should you have to resort to illegal means to play a game you bought? Publishers must be made to see that they exist to serve us, not the other way around. Unfortunately the game devs are the people who suffer, but there are publishers who do not use such DRM - and they will get my business. BUT the more people who buy games with unacceptable DRM, the harder it is to convince companies to stop since they will simply point to their sales figures.

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This is not going to win me any popularity prizes but here goes anyway ...

And a lot of us don't really care about DRM. I've had to have my CD/DVD in the drive since I started playing CD games in 1994 so if I wasn't used to it by now, I would have given up playing a long time ago. I've also had a flat rate internet connection for more than 10 years now so I never give a second thought about internet connection requirements for games.

I've yet to encounter a DRM scheme that caused me any problems (apart from the first few weeks of Morrowind when SecureRom kept stealing 10% of the desperately needed CPU power), so if it'll keep the publishers happy and the games continues to flow, I don't really care what they do.

Once people stop defending the pirates (or making excuses for them) and start talking about how to fix the ridiculous situation the gaming market is in now, then I'll start to care about what level of DRM inconvenience I'd prefer. Until then, however, I can't be bothered to care, since I would be doing that exact same thing if I was in the publishing chair.

booboo said:

I fairly sure that cracking a game is illegal, regardless of your motivation…why should you have to resort to illegal means to play a game you bought? Publishers must be made to see that they exist to serve us, not the other way around. Unfortunately the game devs are the people who suffer, but there are publishers who do not use such DRM - and they will get my business. BUT the more people who buy games with unacceptable DRM, the harder it is to convince companies to stop since they will simply point to their sales figures.

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Yes cracking a game is illegal but i am not cracking anything i just use a crack .
We have talk about this countless times in here , when i buy the CD i buy the right to use software , after applying a crack i exercise my right to use software , nothing illegal there. Modifying files isn't illegal otherwise moders would be in jail.

I couldn't care less about who is right and who is wrong, what is done and what people shall do , i am a gamer so i only play games , i support the developers with my money and the good word in gaming sites , i do not support publishers so i am not going to accept their stupid DRM under any circumstances .

Who cares what's illegal?

What's important is what's RIGHT.

DArtagnan said:

Who cares what's illegal?

What's important is what's RIGHT.

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What you may consider right may be wrong to me....

DArtagnan said:

Who cares what's illegal?

What's important is what's RIGHT.

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Your actions have shifted your alignment :
+3 points good
+3 point chaotic

lostforever said:

What you may consider right may be wrong to me….

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Which is why there's a debate.

I would prefer that they give you a choice when you install the game if they only have online activation or CD verification. I personally hate having to have their CD in the CD drive to start up a game.
I wouldn't be opposed to them asking you , or giving you the option of registering an authenticator with them to be used to start the game, if you chose online verification. Better still if all games could use this same personal authenticator then you only need to keep up with one.

Tragos said:

Modifying files isn't illegal otherwise moders would be in jail.

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This is interesting. If it became illegal that means regular mods would also become illegal, right? But, how many money would the publisher lose because of that compared to the losses they suffer because of piracy.. Not much, it seems to me. So, forbidding any modding could be the way publishers will go in the future (and Blizzard will be actually charging for third party mods).

Greymane said:

I would prefer that they give you a choice when you install the game if they only have online activation or CD verification. I personally hate having to have their CD in the CD drive to start up a game.
I wouldn't be opposed to them asking you , or giving you the option of registering an authenticator with them to be used to start the game, if you chose online verification. Better still if all games could use this same personal authenticator then you only need to keep up with one.

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This is where EA is now leading by example actually (IMHO of course ). Of course their deauthorization tool only works for their own games but it fully puts the power of dealing with limited installs back into the consumer's hands.
In fact with their newer games like BFBC 2 you don't even need an extra tool but you only need to right-click on the game's shortcut in the Games Explorer (Vista/Win7) and select "deauthorize this machine" to free up an install (platform).

They also got that optional stuff you mentioned. I was very pleasantly surprised that after the setup for BFBC 2 had finished, the installer kindly asked me whether I wanted to activate the game online now with no requirement to keep the disc in the drive when launching the game in the future or if I wanted to skip online activation and just keep my disc in the drive.

Here's to hoping that all of their future releases will offer that degree of consumer choice. I mind DRM even less if it is implemented like that (though me is coming from fatBastard's camp, i.e. DRM usually doesn't really bother me in the first place but, yeah sure, more freedom of choice and less restrictions is still always a good thing, of course).

Malk said:

But, how many money would the publisher lose because of that compared to the losses they suffer because of piracy.. Not much, it seems to me.

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DRM does not limit piracy , also as i have explained it works as promotion .
I learn about the witcher via a pirated cd and bought it next morning , my friend who pirated it bought it as well and so did several other people who tried the pirate version. Those with no interest in the game wouldn't buy it anyway , many wouldn't bother download since it is 4gb .
Note that we purchase it when it was full price , not 2 years later for 15€ .

Malk said:

So, forbidding any modding could be the way publishers will go in the future (and Blizzard will be actually charging for third party mods).

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Blizzard charges for content they did not create? so what's next , suing us for modifying config files ?
I think i 'll stick with Paradox and their "you can edit everything" policy .

Tragos said:

DRM does not limit piracy , also as i have explained it works as promotion .
I learn about the witcher via a pirated cd and bought it next morning , my friend who pirated it bought it as well and so did several other people who tried the pirate version. Those with no interest in the game wouldn't buy it anyway , many wouldn't bother download since it is 4gb .
Note that we purchase it when it was full price , not 2 years later for 15€ .

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I think that that's exactly the reason why we have DRM.
I also have bought several games after trying the pirate version (not the Witcher though - I bought the enhanced edition without a second thought as soon as I saw all the goodies included in it) the thing is... these are usually games that I would possibly not risk paying for if I didn't have the chance to try them freely, often because they are games by smaller developers that can't afford a marketing campaign as intense as, say, Bethesda for instance. Plus they often get lower scores at reviews because they don't offer the same amount of shiny glamor.

And if we assume that you can afford to spend a certain limited amount of money to buy games, you might end up not risking buying a less glamorous game like the Wither - you would feel safer paying for a hyped, 'universally acclaimed' game instead.

So effectively a big company might feel that every copy of a small company's game that is promoted through piracy that gets sold is one one less sale for them.

Therefore I believe that piracy hurts the big guys, who are the ones that can easily get away by imposing such unreasonable methods as some of the latest DRMs.

What I actually wonder is: does it actually help them? Do their sales actually increase? My guess would be no... (though I admit that's just a rather uninformed guess. If anyone has evidence to the contrary I'd be happy to see them.)

DRM is useful in terms of preventing 0-day cracks.

That's it.

holeraw said:

snip

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I don't believe that piracy hurts anyone since pirated copies reflect no sales , sure some mid-small companies can promote their software through them and big ones can prove that their product is not a mainstreamed piece of shit (haha i guess they cannot ). DRM , specially the invasive kind can only hurt sales, i think i have gave SI's Football Manager series example again where bad 2009 DRM ruined everything so they reverted back to old disc-check/one time activation in 2010...and we are talking about series that sell on average 1.500.000 copies per release.

For how long do you think Ubishit will be able to keep up on their stupidity ?


I can make a long post on how people buy games but in essence i feel that people buy the genres they like after drawing information from anywhere but big gaming sites and "exclusive" reviews.
IGN & Gamespy can give all the 10/10 's they want to party based RPGS , i will never buy any because i hate those kind of games .

We also all know how USA based sites rate European made games...

holeraw said:

IPeople complain on forums, such as this one, about that consistently. If those companies don't keep track of what people say about them then they don't do themselves any favors.

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kalniel said:

They watch forums, just as they watch the torrent figures.

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I heavily doubt they are monitoring forums - at least not major companies do.

1. You could read and write complints in "official forums" - but things never change. The bigger the company, the less chnge there is (like EA, for example).

2. People only write online. They never do physical letters.

Yet I believe that physical letters have much, much more influence than e-mails and forum entries, which can be easily dismissed, imho.

3. In my impression, there seems to be kind of a "rule of onduct", acording to which the higher the position of t6he person within a company is, the less this person does personal contact to his or her actual customers. The REALLY for important decisions responsibles in my opinion NEVER "go out" into the forums and read stuff there.
It appears to me as if they believe that this is just "ground work" for simple farmers ... err, grunts. Higher positions have their "work force" for hat and don't seem o believe in the neccessity to hve ontact ith actual customers. I call this "losing contact to reality".

4. Smaller companies, however, like CD Projekt, re much, much, much more agile. their success IS a DIRECT result - at least so I see it - of close contact to the mass of the customers. They are agile, and that means the are not only reading what the cutomers write them, but they also act accordingly.

5. The more success - the bigger a company becomes - the more the responsibles lose contact to reality.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

3. In my impression, there seems to be kind of a "rule of onduct", acording to which the higher the position of t6he person within a company is, the less this person does personal contact to his or her actual customers. The REALLY for important decisions responsibles in my opinion NEVER "go out" into the forums and read stuff there.

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How do you know that?

Malk said:

How do you know that?

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I don't. But that's how I perceive the world.

Or did you ever see a high-ranking official of let's say EA appear in EAs forums and answer people's questions ? Especially those regarding game issues ?

Or have you ever seen things change after lots of complaints ? I hink there are more than enough games of EA where people complain about issues - yet nothing happens. Or with other companies.


Here, in Cologne, there was recently a small scandal of a building company hired to renovate a bigger house in which a lot of people were living.

The renovation began with bringing up scaffolding, putting tarps around the big house, thus kind of encasing the people during the winter … they just couldn't look out of the windows anymore. The tarp was hindering their sight.

The company responsible for the renovating even got the outer isolating hull (so to say) of the building knocked off - because it was one of the parts that had to be renewed.

And then, there was nothing.

The company responsible for all of this renovating went out of business, a new one came, and this one went into a small legal quarrel with the house owning company.

All of these months, during winte, nothing happened. The scaffolding and the tarps were still there.
And the people were freezing.

They were said to have been writing letters to the management of the company which owned the house.

Nothing happened.

Nothing happened again.

Nothing happened once more.

THEN he local newspaper brought pictures of the huge building into the reader's sight. And they reported about the scaffolding, the tarps, the freezing people. And the company hich had gone out of business. And the legal argument. And the company which owned the house not reacting.

After SEVERAL of these articles, the management … formerly totally sober and always saying everything was okay and the thing would soon be solved and the people shouldn't be too sensitive towards everything … THEN they actually MET the people. They SAW them living wrapped inside of the scaffolding and the tarps, so to say. And they were SHOCKED.

And THEN, everything was solved within a few days. A new compn came, everything proceeded as normal, soon everything was gone. Plus, the management gave them the money back, which the freezing people had to pay too much, because of the missing proper isolation of the whole building.


That's how I perceive the world around me. High-ranking officials NEVER bother to listen to the people "on the ground".

You have to know the facts if you want to have a valid opinion. This are just guesses, you don't have anything to back them up. Pure speculation which is probably far from truth.

And how do you account for Bioware's relationship with their fans? The higher ups are reading the forums (or so their claim is, at least), the community co-ordinators actually listen and bring the concerns from fans etc. upwards to the higher ups. And sometimes the guy responsible for it all such as the Lead Director for Mass Effect or Dragon Age stops buy and says something. Ferndado Melo, the lead for Bioware's online-team have stopped by many times by their forums to explain things. Even when the debate were most heated on DRM-policy, Bioware actually allowed 1-2 threads in their off-topic forums, where other companies would have shut them down (almost) immediately.

And I have to agree with Alrik here: physical, real letters, are a much better way of protesting something that you don't like. It shows that you do care enough about the subject. Case in Point: People from The Silver Lining (KQ9 unofficially) forums are doing just this to get the attention from Activision.

An even better way to get a company to take notice is to hurt them where it (really) hurts. e.g. make sture they lose money. Case in Point: many people did not buy Mass Effect 1 because of the DRM assigned to it by Bioware and EA. And these many people probably told others about this DRM - EA lost money. At least this would be my bet, since they changed the DRM back to a simple disc check for DA: Origins and Mass Effect 2.

As more and more times goes on, I would like to see something similar as to what Moriendor describes. I've gotten sort of used to not playing with a disc in the drive; it also does not scratch the disc.