Assuming you agree with CD Projekt's approach to gathering piracy statistics, the community rewarded them by pirating the game in extraordinarily large numbers, despite the gesture of good faith http://gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-2-pirated-45-million-ti...
First of all, what is this monolithic "community" you're talking about? Secondly, the question is not if more people will pirate without DRM, but if the company can increase their revenues - in the long term - by making that move.
I'm basically referring to the fervent anti-DRM crowd (most gaming sites communities), and I would have expected at least a lower than average piracy rate for a game where the developer basically "gave in" to this group, in an attempt to placate them.
Apparently this group is group is not actually that big/influential and/or there is a significant group of people who pirate regardless of developer goodwill, etc.
1) In the case of CD Projekt you're ignoring the part about how their DRM was cracked in about 48 hours. If I remember correctly, that's one of the major reasons they abandoned it.
2) Most of the "fervent anti-DRM crowd" are actually the people who pay for the games. Real pirates could care less about traditional DRM schemes; they could always circumvent them until now.
3) As algorias already mentioned there are multiple communities in gaming. I'm sure video game piracy stats also greatly vary by country. I'm going to take a wild guess that it's the worst in Asia (excluding Japan) due to the culture.
This falls prey to the classic fallacy of "piracy" critics, that all instances of piracy are effectively lost sales.
In fact, there's little evidence this is so for most games. It makes sense that a game that can be pirated will be so by a higher number of people than those who pay for it, but this alone does not support the conclusion that the rates of purchase for a game that is extensively pirated are necessarily lower than if that wasn't the case.
In the case of The Witcher 2, after the patch that removed the onerous SecuROM DRM fully 4 million additional copies of the game have been purchased to date, compared to around 1 million copies total purchased during the few months after release while the DRM was still in place.
Obviously in no way does each instance of piracy equate to a lost sale, but even a moderate percentage of instances of piracy that actually lost a sale would be a disappointing total sum lost by the developer, considering the enormous overall rate of piracy.
Also, the 4 million figure is total sales of the first and second games on all released platforms, not solely PC nor following the removal of the DRM, unless you have a source that wildly disagrees with mine. It would certainly be an impressive vote of no confidence in DRM if 4 PC million sales had occurred subsequent to the removal of the DRM, however that appears not to be the case. http://gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-series-sales-hit-4-mill...
Considering how vastly pirated copies usually outnumber purchased copies, I hope you don't consider "a moderate percentage" to be something high, like 30% would be.
I always thought I was not the crazy one that wouldn't buy a game because of the DRM, but I'm finally that guy. I love the Sim City games and remember playing them since the 90's, but I can't pay into a company which preferred the DRM over playability and kept the DRM even when it meant making people wait instead of releasing a patch with more responsible DRM to truly fix the problem.
It only appears crazy to those who find themselves desperate to play said games. Others, who aren't, or have created boycotts, can make decisions based on DRM.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to play that game. The company EA, to me, just has a lot less reputation than Amazon where I buy plenty of DRM'd books. Although, Amazon has a workable DRM model at the moment that doesn't break-down when you are offline or when Amazon servers are offline.
Is there any hope that this game will ever be pirated? I understand that there is some type of online-only DRM, but aren't some games like WoW played on private servers? I liked the old SimCity games, but probably won't even bother looking into this one for a while.
It's a bit of a different type of game, Diablo 2-esque, but if anyone hasn't tried Path of Exile, I suggest it. A small, independent studio just launched much more smoothly than EA can, is pretty good about how they treat players and is adding content weekly.
Starcraft 2 got its always-online cracked, as did most of the Ubisoft titles forcing it like Assassins Creed 2. I think the only example without good cracks is Diablo 3, and I know if I was a game cracker I wouldn't even bother, just because D3 sucked for me.
I imagine SimCity has enough publicity the warez crowd is jumping all over the opportunity to be first to crack it. People I know that have played it called BS on all the allegations that anything critical to the game running is server side, because the servers can go down while they are playing and they only lose saves and achievements.
Eventually someone will get around to reverse-engineering it. One good recent example is Diablo III, which had a semi-working emulator (most of the content was not yet implemented) by the time retail was released, but was shutdown following a C&D from Blizzard.
Intuit removed the DRM from TurboTax after one release in 2003 after public outcry and financial analysts questioned them about it. All you gamers have to do is stick to your position and not buy the product. Unless you hit them where it counts, they will continue to do this. Imagine, if the sales didn't meet expectations and analysts questioned EA.
