Fire Alarm Companies

shown here on Techdirt, there are several ways to respond to piracy. Ubisoft, in particular, has often found a way to make it worse, either express DRM revocation or refusal to sign the release of some PC games.



other hand, you have companies like Valve, who recognize that every case of piracy is simply someone who wants something for nothing, but rather a opportunity for the company pirated experiment with price and convenience options to meet the needs of clients served.

Now you can add CD Projekt, the editor of The Witcher 2, to the growing list of software companies who see piracy as an opportunity rather than a Well lost sales. In an interview with PC Magazine, CEO and co-founder Marcin Iwinski came up with some quick calculations on the time that The Witcher 2 has been hacked, arrive at a truly impressive:

was regularly check the number of simultaneous downloads in torrent aggregation sites, and during the first 6-8 weeks, there were about 20-30k ppl to download same time. Take the average 20k and we'll take 6 weeks. The game is 14 GB, so let's assume that, on average, not very fast connection is 6 hours of discharge. 6 weeks is 56 days, the equivalent of 1344 hours, 6 hours and the average download time for the game to give us 224 downloads, so we will multiply by 20 000 discharged simultaneously


The result is about 4.5 million illegal downloads. This is only an estimate, and I'd say it's rather on the optimistic side of things, from now sold over 1 million legal copies, so that only 4.5 to 5 for illegal copies each non-legal would be a bad relationship. The reality is probably much worse.

Although the free version is to "sell" the retail version of 5 to 1, Iwinsky emphasizes the policy of non-DRM his company , noting that the CD Projeckt always had to compete with free:

From the beginning, our main competitors in the market were pirated. The real question is not whether the company X or Y had better marketing and better communication, but rather "How can we convince gamers to buy the legitimate version and not go to a street vendor local and buy a pirate? "We, of course, experienced with all available DRM / protection against copying, but frankly, did not work. All I used was broken in a day or two, so massive and immediately copied to the streets to a fraction of our costs.

not give up, but he stayed with a new strategy: we began to offer a high value to the product - how to improve the game with objects additional collection "as the soundtrack, making DVDs, books, tutorials, etc., with a long process of awareness of local stakeholders about why it makes sense to actually buy the games legally, worked. And today we have a reasonable market games. healthy



not your "reason to buy." And now Iwinsky truism:


Find best price for : --Projekt--