Good Old Games Interview
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Eurogamer: Eurogamer abhors piracy, but I do believe that DRM is self-defeating. It galvanises huge swathes of your most loyal customers against you. Obviously you're in a unique position because you are re-publishing games that have been on the market for years, so it's not the same; there isn't the launch-day rush to piracy. But what do you think publishers putting brand new stuff out should do instead of DRM? What would you do on a new Witcher, for example? You must have thought about it.
Tom Ohle: Just some quick clarification: GOG.com and CD Projekt RED (The Witcher developers) are two separate divisions of CD Projekt; so the two companies work independently and I just so happen to be in a unique position in that I work for and can comment on both!
We already showed a bit of where we'd like to go with full-scale PC products with The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. Yes it still had copy protection, but it was about as limited as possible. Of course, even with that limited protection, the game has been pirated, showing again that you just can't stop those jerks. But we went in and packed the retail version full of bonus materials, making it akin to a Collector's Edition at a standard-game price. We tossed in two music CDs, a making-of DVD, a couple of short adventures, a map, etc., to encourage people to actually cough up their hard-earned money for a physical product, and I think that's the key to maintaining (or perhaps re-establishing) a strong market for PC games at retail.
On the PC you don't have to worry about things like paying licensing fees back to the console manufacturer, so you theoretically have a lot more room to play around with box contents. In an ideal world, we'd want a new Witcher game to have no copy protection whatsoever - I'm being serious there - and we'd just incentivise the purchase of the retail product, as well as making sure that the game is easily available for purchase digitally. Of course there are business realities that for one reason or another might not make that possible, but we're rather passionate about this subject.
Hell, we'd even want to make sure that the digitally available game has the same bonus content (as we did with the Enhanced Edition) to encourage people to pay for it. It's just a matter of treating your customers with respect, rather than putting in copy protection that doesn't prevent piracy anyway - all you're doing is increasing the possibility that someone might run into issues with the protection software... and maybe you're even issuing a challenge to potential pirates: "We've got something that will make it harder for you to distribute our game illegally. What are you going to do about it?"
