The Witcher 2 DRM cracked

Protecting games from being copied and distributed illegally is all but impossible, and DRM has been repeatedly proven to just annoy the users who paid for a game rather than stopping piracy. But publishers continue to insist on including some form of DRM on discs as a (useless) deterrent.

Piracy of The Witcher 2 is sure to have those same publishers scratching their heads, though. The reason being, two versions of the game were released: a DRM-free download version through the popular CD Projekt-owned site GOG.com. The other was a boxed copy complete with DRM distributed by Ubisoft.

Guess which version is being pirated?

While the game is available right now without DRM from GOG, if you choose to download the game illegally the version you’ll most likely get is the Ubisoft release with the DRM cracked. It seems the GOG version has been left alone for the most part.

So why pirate the more difficult DRM-protected version? CD Projekt and GOG have no idea other than guessing it offers no challenge to a pirate. CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwinski suggests that the piracy scene is all about the “game and the glory.” In other words, if there’s nothing to crack, why bother?

I’d also like to suggest that this is in some way support from those who pirate games for a title that removes the DRM barrier. Those cracking the game and distributing it may be after the glory, but they could also be doing it to get around the frustration of DRM. For example, the need to always have a disc in your drive to play, the requirement of a constant Internet connection for a single-player game, a game “breaking” due to it shipping with limited installs, or the performance hit your system takes due to the way in which the DRM works on your machine. None of those frustrations exist with a DRM-free game.

The question piracy of The Witcher 2 poses is: if DRM was no longer used across all games, would piracy decrease? CD Projekt announced last year that The Witcher 2 had been pirated 4.5 million times, while 1 million legitimate copies had been sold. The company view that 1 to 5 ratio as not bad at all.

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