Tolya: To say it is a failure you would need to take into account how much money was spent on creating/implementing a DRM system. And establish that a DRM free game is more likely to be pirated. Then see if the surplus of illegal downloads offsets the costs of DRM.
Show me those numbers.
dksone: Even without the cost, a DRM is going to get cracked and the game pirated on release day anyway.
I'm not sure I have the same opinion on GOG/CDPR stance on DRM as most of the users that posted in this thread.
As far as I understand it CDPR's idea is that any DRM is a bad idea because the following are almost always true:
- DRM costs money to the publisher which has to be added to the game costs and therefore hurts the customer's wallet
- DRM has proven to be an ineffective anti-piracy tool as can be seen by the vast amount of games that have cracks available on day 1 (if not earlier)
- DRM can cause the game to run less than optimally therefore hurting the customer's gaming experience (in some famous examples using a NoCD resulted in significant FPS increase)
In a nutshell (warning, personnal opinion) CDPR declared the concept of DRM an utter failure, and instead of actively fighting piracy went with the philosophy that if a product is good and works fine out of the box then it may be an incentive for the usual pirates to actually buy the game. Zero loss (compared to other similarly-pirated games) and potential profit.
This being said, I used to follow the news from the major cracking groups a long time ago, and I was sometimes surprised by the weirdly-ethical code they used to follow. There was a case a long time ago where all the major groups refused to release a game for the simple reason it did not contain any protection. They even made fun of the "group" that eventually released it. Gonna try to remember which game it was.
Nowadays it seems like people take pride in uploading DRM-free software, oh well...