Shadow Warrior 2 Developers Say DRM Is a Waste of Time (arstechnica.com)

zarmanto writes: Ars Technica reports that one particular game studio might finally get it, when it comes to DRM'ed game content. They're publishing their latest game, Shadow Warrior 2, with no DRM protection at all. From the article: "We don't support piracy, but currently there isn't a good way to stop it without hurting our customers," Flying Wild Hog developer Krzysztof "KriS" Narkowicz wrote on the game's Steam forum (in response to a question about trying to force potential pirates to purchase the game instead). "Denuvo means we would have to spend money for making a worse version for our legit customers. It's like the FBI warning screen on legit movies." Expanding on those thoughts in a recent intervew with Kotaku, Narkowicz explained why he felt the DRM value proposition wasn't worth it. "Any DRM we would have needs to be implemented and tested," he told Kotaku. "We prefer to spend resources on making our game the best possible in terms of quality, rather than spending time and money on putting some protection that will not work anyway." "The trade-off is clear," Flying Wild Hog colleagues Artur Maksara and Tadeusz Zielinksi added. "We might sell a little less, but hey, that's the way the cookie crumbles! We hope that our fans, who were always very supportive, will support us this time as well," Zielinski told Kotaku. "...In our imperfect world, the best anti-pirate protection is when the games are good, highly polished, easily accessible and inexpensive," Maksara added.

Comments

The Witcher 3

[carbs77]

Didn't the Witcher 3 also not have any DRM if you got it through GOG?

Re:The Witcher 3

[Barefoot Monkey]

Witcher 2 had DRM for about 48hrs, and then the developers removed it because it was hurting legitimate customers.

It was an awkward situation. CD Projeckt (a publisher, and the parent company of CD Projekt RED) distributed The Witcher 2 in Poland and internationally through GOG.com. But they needed the help of international publishers to sell retail in other parts of the world, so they signed up with Bandai Namco and Atari to publish the game elsewhere. (Apparently Polish laws make it nearly impossible for them to handle international distribution themselves, which is the main reason they registered their subsidiary, GOG.com, outside Poland)

Anyway, although CD Projekt is firmly anti-DRM, one or both of these other publishers decided to slap DRM onto the files that they distributed, more because of internal policy than any practical reason. The DRM broke the game and made CD Projekt look like hypocrites, so they quickly released a patch to repair all the files broken by the DRM, which inevitably disabled the DRM in the process. I believe the publishers who broke the game sued them for fixing it, but CDP won that case. Unfortunately Bandai Namco won another lawsuit forcing CDP to make the game more expensive for Australians instead of making it the same price everywhere.

If you bought The Witcher 2 from GOG it never had DRM in the first place, and no matter where you bought the game you could go to gog.com/witcher/backup to redeem a complimentary GOG version for yourself.

Games are a luxury article

[gweihir]

While brain-dead publishers act as if they are a necessity, and apparently make decisions as if they were, they clearly are not. Hence the only thing a degraded quality (in the form of DRM and a higher price) gets you is less profit. Economics 101, but it seems that is already too difficult for some people.