CD Projekt reveals extent of Witcher 2 piracy

For every copy of The Witcher 2 that’s been legitimately sold, more than four copies have been pirated, according to the CEO of creator CD Projekt.

Marcin Iwinski insisted it would be pointless for his company to use digital rights management (DRM) technologies to attempt to curb piracy, but believes Witcher 2 was a recurring victim to illicit file sharing.

I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first 6-8 weeks [since the game’s release] there was around 20-30k people downloading it at the same time,” Iwinskitold PC Gamer.

So let’s take 20k as the average and let’s take 6 weeks. The game is 14GB, so let’s assume that on an average not-too-fast connection it will be 6 hours of download. 6 weeks is 56 days, which equals to 1344 hours; and with 6h of average download time to get the game it would give us 224 downloads, then let’s multiply it by 20k simultaneous downloaders.

The result is roughly 4.5 million illegal downloads. This is only an estimation, and I would say that’s rather on the optimistic side of things; as of today we have sold over 1 million legal copies, so having only 4.5-5 illegal copies for each legal one would be not a bad ratio.”

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