Still, these numbers do not constitute lost sales, according to the CEO. The DRM-free version at GOG.com didn’t fit this too well.'īack in December, Iwinski estimated the game had been pirated over 4.5 million times, and by now, that figure has probably risen significantly. 'The illegal scene is pretty much about the game and the glory: who will be the first to deliver the game, who is the best and smartest cracker. My guess is, that releasing an unprotected game is not the real deal, you have to crack it to gain respect and be able to write: 'cracked by XYZ.” How would “not cracked by XYZ, as there was nothing to crack” sound? A bit silly, wouldn’t it? 'Practically anyone could have downloaded it from GOG.com and released it on the illegal sites right away, but this did not happen. 'We were expecting to see the GOG.com version pirated right after it was released, as it was a real no-brainer,' added Iwinski. “Most people in the gaming industry were convinced that the first version of the game to be pirated would be the GOG version, while in the end it was the retail version, which shipped with DRM,' Rambourg told Forbes.

The reason, according to Rambourg and CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwinski, has less to do with sharing and more to do with the reputation gleaned from cracking a title's DRM. GOG's managing director, Guillaume Rambourg, has said that surprisingly enough, it wasn't the DRM-free version of The Witcher II which was pirated the most, but the retail version which shipped with DRM.

Adding cracked games to steam