How Bad is PC Piracy Really?

Eurogamer has slapped up an interesting three-page article that attempts to determine just how rampant PC game piracy is, as well as the pros and cons associated with the various DRM schemes publishers are currently using to combat it. Several developers share some commentary for the article, including Good Old Games’ Guillaume Rambourg:

“Piracy is some kind of ghost enemy, and chasing a ghost enemy is a pure waste of time and resources. The only way really is to make the whole gaming experience easy, convenient and rewarding for the users – this is the only way to fight against piracy,” says Rambourg.

“If you make an experience troublesome or if it’s a pain in the back for the users, they will be tempted to give piracy a try. You really have to make sure that whoever buys a game, whether digitally or in retail, is starting the game and playing it straight away. Nowadays we’re in a very fast-paced society, and anything taking more than five minutes is seen as a trouble by anybody.

“If you make the process too troublesome – even if you are a good hearted gamer, you will be tempted to give piracy a try. This should be the obsession to fight piracy. Putting restrictive measures, putting any kind of technical restraints can only encourage piracy, whether it’s DRM or anything else.”

Rambourg is a man of his word. The Witcher 2 was sold on GOG.com with no DRM, and DRM was quickly patched out of other versions (it was there originally to prevent pre-release leaks) – a bold experiment. And a successful one?

“Honestly, we are very satisfied,” he tells me. “I’m not doing some corporate blah blah right now – we are really happy. Just to give you an idea – of course I cannot disclose sales numbers: in the first two months of release we have sold more units of The Witcher 2 than of any other game on GOG.com in the past. Even when we released Fallout, Duke Nukem 3D or any triple-A back catalogue title, we never sold that many units within the first two months.”

However, he adds a note of caution. “I presume the first version that was interesting for hackers, let’s say, was the GOG version. This was the easiest master to get and make available online. Did it impact CDP Red sales worldwide across all distribution channels – retail and digital? I have no idea to be honest. We do know what is the average number of times that The Witcher 2 has been downloaded [a method GOG uses to monitor piracy levels] and, honestly speaking, the number is anything but scary; it’s really in the average we have across the whole catalogue, the whole line-up of GOG. There was no specific spike for The Witcher 2. Users and their temptation to pirate the game is minimal – it’s not visible.”