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.
