CD Projekt Sundays
The Witcher 2
The Witcher 2 developers don’t like the idea of the next-gen Xbox blocking pre-owned games.
Which, really, is fairly consistent with CD Projekt’s overall philosophy about such things:
No, Saints Row developer Volition – the next Xbox possibly preventing people from playing pre-owned games “can be a bad thing”.
Those words belong to Adam Badowski, managing director of Polish Witcher 2 developer CD Projekt Red, who spoke to Eurogamer today.
“It can be a bad thing,” Badowski said of the rumoured next Xbox technology.He explained: “I assume you know we decided not to continue our beautiful journey with lawyers seeking pirates…
“We are losing money not because of pirates; we are losing money because people decided not to buy our game.
“We should invest more power to upgrade and polish our products and convince players to keep our products, to be with us, to understand our needs – because we are an independent developer, we have to prevent lay-offs, we need to grow up and have the power to create new games.
“We want to be treated fairly.
“Most hardcore and hardware solutions will be OK for short periods,” Badowski bombarded, “but a strong relationship with players, with customers, can change the situation. And for us, this is a better way.”
Someone explain this to Ubisoft, eh?
Fantastic perspective. Less lock-down, more awesomeness in the game. What would be insanely smart would be to distribute the game by torrent yourself and have a Donate option on the main menu linked to PayPal or what-have-you. Even if you paid for the game, you could give a buck or two if you really liked it and appreciated the work of the developers. If you had pirated it, or thought that you had, you could donate to pay for the piracy. Even pirated copies would generate revenue, and could be considered free advertising if heavily seeded.
Extreme respect for CD Projekt.
Working hard at repairing their reputation after that whole ’email suspected pirates with legal threats’ debacle.
Interesting. I didn’t know about that. Here’s more info:
http://kotaku.com/5875574/cd-projekt-retires-its-witcher-2-piracy-witch+hunt
If they were going to email them they should have sent them a link to purchase the game. Wonder how they got people’s email addresses though. You can grab IP addresses through a torrent but that’s about it.
What would be interesting is if a DRM-like mechanism was implemented that created a unique hardware profile of the computer it was being run on and sent it to the developers along with a key unique to each copy of the game. It wouldn’t give them specific piracy rates or numbers of used game transactions, but would provide a rough idea. If they made it transparent to the user and it failed silently if offline, no one would know and it wouldn’t get stripped out by crackers.
Actually, Sanctimonia, systems like that sort of exist, and most of the major publishers use them. Hell, I know — knew — a guy who worked on the stuff.
I mean…how else do you think they’d know that a statistically significant number of players tend to die at point X in version 1.01 of a game, and so make sure to add a couple of health potions to a nearby loot drop with the version 1.02 patch?
Instinct, intuition and superior design capability?
And anonymous usage/performance statistics!
I am still laughing at the name of their game.
The Witcher is the Witchiest!
I’m sure it sounds cooler in Polish.
Anyone else feel that The Witcher series got more credit than it deserved, just because they had a sense of “for PC gamers only”?
That said, kudos to them for realizing there is such a thing as a PC snob market and tapping into it.
Well…it’s not just a “sense”. The Witcher games have graphical fidelity and environmental detail that brings consoles to their knees. They also have a lot of choice and complexity.
You’re right though that the first game has a lot of quirky, seemingly poorly translated writing (although with a lot of gems hidden in it). Haven’t played the second yet.
The actiony timed click combat also isn’t for everyone.