It's true, but pirates are people as well and they grow up.
I used to be a pirate when I was little but now I am cherry picking my gaming needs and pay for them.

When something is good you will want to buy in the end*.

* This is, unfortunately, not true for all human beings xD

I do have to say it's rather tempting to predownload and apply a patch that lets you play right away. Luckily I'm in no position, but I could see many people wanting to do this. Especially if they already paid and are impatient

CDPR changed my pirating ways when I joined GOG. I saw games with a price tag so low, I thought to myself: Well it's not worth the effort to pirate if I can buy a working game and install it with ease for this little amount of money.

Sadly this will happen people will pirate anything all we can do is try and steer people into buying the game instead of just downloading it.

I agree with Senteria. Remember when games were made even for machines generations old, so everyone could play them? That's how you attract more customers, not by making a game that only selected few can play. I still won't be able to play it soon, as my PC is an old dual core E6850 and my graphic card is 650Ti Boost, with only 4gb RAM. So...

The industry needs to understand that if they want more customers quality and affordability is the way to go. You don't cater to only a few, but to many. 10 years of PS3/XBox, people got used with a slow upgrading rate. And the industry wants the leap to the new generation to be done in a second. Just look to the insane requirements lately. I mean, not a i5, but directly i7, tons of RAM and next gen graphic cards. And we know that those games could be optimised for the previous gen PC's (see DA: Inquisition which has a PS3/XBox 360 version or how pirates found out the artificial blocks on hardware for COD latest games). Give people a bit of time, pushing them in this way, leads to losing them as clients. EA already announced that their next games won't work on OS older than Windows 10. The AAA industry is so far of reality and their possible customers on PC....

So, making the games accessible to as many people as you can, that was the way of PC up to 2010's. Something horribly went wrong. Compare pricing from the first part of 2014 and from second part of the very same year. See how many GOOD AAA titles are coming out lately. The beginning of 2015 was great for indies, but the AAA releases are few and far between. And all those releases are demanding. Geo restrictions, everyone and his grandma is making a client. No company is listening.

Every time when i here immersion, photorealism, particles...i get the gut feeling that's nothing to that game that would make me play it. When yo know that your content is bad or not good enough, you throw in tech details. Because people don't understand and the reviews are embargoed until release.

Maybe someday the bloody industry wiill grow up. But for now...Just kids with toys and not much of understanding of what to do with them

As for piracy...Dammit...Console pirates are getting away with it, despite all the games leaking out with at least a week or a month before launch. And yet the full blame is given to PC. Because, you know, securing your product is the job of....your customer?! Your janitor?! Your grandma?!

Pirates are gonna pirate, people that want to buy it, will buy it, maybe not instantly, but whenever they can afford it.

I can understand people wanting to play the game, but the funny thing, most of the people don't even read the system requirements (pirates included). So i expect a lot of bitching and moaning for the completely wrong reasons.

Well, sorry for the hectic post

Pirates are going to pirate, there is no real way to combat it. All you can do is make their releases less interesting to those who may turn to piracy. But there are always going to be those who just want something for nothing, look at Daredevil on Netflix that was the second most pirated show just behind Game of Thrones when it went up on Netflix, Netflix costs around 7 or 8 dollars US and the excuses you would see to justify them pirating the show just often entered into logic defying territory.

If someone couldn't bother plunking down 7 to 8 dollars or bother borrowing someone's netflix account to watch the show but instead had to pirate it, I doubt they are going to plunk down 60 bucks for a video game. Not saying all Pirates are like that, some do it because that is the only way they can get access to the game, avoid dealing with shitty DRM, getting ripped off by regional price gouging, regional restrictions, ect. those are the ones you can convert the others like the ones I mentioned just do it because they are mentally little kids doing it for the jollies/because they can.

As for taking legal action they could but I don't think they will after the backlash they got the last time they threatened to go after pirates when the Witcher 2 dropped. Honestly if I was CD Projekt I would of just uploaded a crippled version of the game like Croteam did with Serious Sam 3 where the pirated version had a unkillable enemy spawn or the guys behind Game dev tychoon where you would get a game over after a few weeks due to your company going under because of software piracy.

Yep, when you start realizing this stuff, it is called growing up :D

I pirated the first witcher. I was so amazed by the story and how it plays out that I went and bought W1 and W2 from GOG the same day. That was the last day I pirated a game. Not even miss those days :)

My story is almost similar. :P

To be fair, 90% of the world has no access to netflix. Which is not the case with The Witcher 3.

That's cute.
8 years ago when I read the exclusive review about The Witcher I thought I should grab it.
I went to near by outlet. I saw The Witcher DVD in their shelf.
I looked at it's price and put it back to shelf.
I didn't had a PC at that time neither I had enough coins to buy the original game.
However I used to collect games for feature by reading reviews and buy the used one.
Since the game file was large I couldn't afford to download the full game either.
So I left that shop and went to another which had Pirated version of the game.
I got thrilled.
I put my hands inside my pocket and took the money out.
When I counted, I realized if I buy the game I will have to walk 9KMs.
So I left the place. And noted down it's name in wishlist.
Few months later when I went to college I downloaded The Witcher Demo.
I tried to install it on that PC but it didn't ran as that PC didn't meet the minimum requirement.
I took Demo setup in my pendrive and kept it safe.
Few days later I helped someone to build a gaming rig only at the promise that he will let me play The Witcher Demo.
I played it and liked it very much.
In June 2013 when I joined GOG (Only because I was going to get legal Torchlight for free) I saw The Witcher series in their catalog I started to save money for it.
However I didn't got a chance to spend my saving on The Witcher.
Then last year a miracle happened GOG had a promo "Buy Anything and get The Witcher Enhanced Edition free"
I grabbed it by buying a dollar game.

That's how I and The Witcher got together for ever and ever.
And that's too without piracy (Although it took 7 years. I wonder how much years will it take me for The Witcher 3)!

Back in the day it was about using a double deck player to copy cassettes.

I know still have me C64 games on cassette, back in the mid 80's everyone had a ghetto blaster, with dual tape decks

Tape to tape games just as the founders of CDPR did

I'm glad your long distance relationship worked out for you =D

I think that if we wished it, we could all have any game we like free. Trust is what GoG is all about. I would imagine that for every copy pirated, 100 are bought legally.

There will always be those that take and those that pay there way.
Just the simple fact that GoG is DRM-free encourages people to buy, who may have otherwise pirated.

Since I missed the beginning the this discussion, there is one thing I enjoy as representative of bashed "pirate fleet cove" PC Master race - console version of Witcher 3, on super-duper protected platforms that were not just played, but broadcast through twitch. And that's in a light of rumours that PC retail will require minor download to verify date. Ain't that great? I guess they had it coming, trying like zero things to prevent premature launch (oh, wait, dem journos prolly got consoles copies for reviews, tsk-tsk-tsk), and having printed games two weeks before release. Bloody hypocrites. /grin