CD Projekt Explains Legal Actions Against Pirates

After reports of CD Projekt fining file-sharers for sums as high as €911.80, Eurogamer tracked down the company for some comments, which they were more than happy to provide. Essentially, they assured that they only take action when they are absolutely certain:

The company told Eurogamer: “As you know, we aren’t huge fans of any sort of DRM here at CD Projekt RED. DRM itself is a pain for legal gamers – the same group of honest people who decided that our game was worth its price, and went and bought it. We don’t want to make their lives more difficult by introducing annoying copy protection systems.

“Moreover, we always try to offer high value with our product – for example, enhancing the game with additional collectors’ items such as soundtracks, making-of DVDs, books, walkthroughs, etc. We could introduce advanced copy protection systems which, unfortunately, punish legal customers as well. Instead, we decided to give gamers some additional content with each game release, to make their experience complete.

“However,” CD Projekt added, “that shouldn’t be confused with us giving a green light to piracy. We will never approve of it, since it doesn’t only affect us but has a negative impact on the whole game industry.

“We’ve seen some of the concern online about our efforts to thwart piracy, and we can assure you that we only take legal actions against users who we are 100 per cent sure have downloaded our game illegally.”

Additionally, Eurogamer reports that the company has been already using this tactic with their first title, The Witcher:

What’s more, CD Projekt has been caught using a similar “shakedown” tactic – a phrase coined recently by a US judge – before.

In 2008, many UK gamers received letters from Davenport Lyons demanding similar cash settlements for Atari game The Witcher 1.