Larian Studios - On Pirating Games and Cloud Streaming

Originally Posted by stealth
Just curious but he talks about CD Project suddenly starting taking action against pirates. Can anyone elaborate what this is about and what made them change their minds?

I assume Namco Bandai changed their minds, or, to be more detailed, the court decision in favour to Namco Bandai - which has also led to Geo-IP tagging by CD Projekt.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
Not correct, as far as I can see.

Not directly - but indirectly, I suppose.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
Not correct, as far as I can see.

You're right. CDProjectRed said they weren't going to punish legit customers by including draconian DRM. That didn't mean they weren't going after pirates.

So it's separate from the Namco-Bandai wrangling.

From back in May, 2011:

http://torrentfreak.com/witcher-2-dr…rrents-110527/

In practice, CD Projekt RED has stated that they drop requests for the larger 750 euro fees if the user purchases the game and provides proof of such purchase (or is able to prove innocence.) So if you're concerned about getting one of these letters and you enjoyed the game then I guess you can buy a copy and rest assured they won't send you any indimidating letters. How intimidating these letters are compared to other notifications of infringment might be pretty speculative. I haven't found a copy of one posted anywhere yet and the original reports that filtered out got something that straight forward wrong at first. I can imagine something more complicated like the relative tone and sentiment of an official notification from a law firm just might have been misunderstood at some point and reported inacccurately as well.

Originally Posted by JuliusMagnus
So it's separate from the Namco-Bandai wrangling.

From back in May, 2011:

http://torrentfreak.com/witcher-2-dr…rrents-110527/

Yeah quite a few publishers and developers watch torrents themselves or the ESA has firms do it on their behalf if they are are member companies. They also usually send your ISP a request to ask that you stop rather quickly not many months later - the idea being it is best to cull seeds from the swarm as quickly as you can. Ostensibly this makes some dent in swarm health - but I suppose the the idea that these users will post on that they received the warning on the tracker sites they used is probably the real reason it makes sense to send notifications as soon as you're reasonably sure they'll go to the right users.

Also probably why some (like Zenimax) send rather polite warnings first instead of going right for settlement requests; they may believe its more useful and effective to let people know they're watching than it is to extract payment from them. Even CD projekt red has said they drop the matter if you purchase the game - which means I suspect they're also more interested in the chilling effect of these notifications than the actual compensation collected from individual pirates.

The decision to retain the services of a German law firm specializing in perusing copyright claims of this nature is more recent than their announcement that they were watching those torrents. I don't see any indication as to whether this was a decision in response to the perceived ineffectiveness of the far earlier announcement and wholly separate from issues related to the lawsuit or whether the decision to elevate awareness of this issue was influenced by the large costs associated with being the losing party in a long legal battle.

So yeah it might be separate and the timing (about 1 week after the ruling) could very well be completely coincidental. To postulate it is either is purely speculative, which is why my leaving off of a question mark was a significant error. Right now though it is not hard to imagine they have significantly greater need of some extra income than they might have expected as they seemed to indicate this was not the verdict they were hoping for..

Well, not using DRM is not the same as not caring about people pirating your games. I somehow made the mistake in thinking they actually just accepted that some people will pirate your games DRM or not.

On a side note I don't expect any letters as I have three physical copies of TW (Standard, Collectors and Extended) as well as Steam and GOG versions. Got GOG version and boxed collectors edition of TW2.