Witcher 3 had no copy protection and/or DRM and was instantly pirated. It still sold millions of copies. The same will happen with Cyberpunk 2077.

Most pirates will pirate a game, and if they can't they'll wait until a crack is available. Only a few of them will actually buy the game day one if they can't pirate it.
On the other hand most serious customers are willing to spend money on a good game, even if they can get for free from illegal sites. And a few of those actually resort to piracy to avoid intrusive DRM even if they would have spent money for a DRM-free version.

it will instantly sell 1000000+ copies is what it will do.

Loads of people bought The Witcher 3, loads still do even if it has no DRM. There will always be pirates, but I know from friends who use piracy as a demo and generally buy the games they like or uninstall those they don't like. Personally, I'll get it at some point after I've beefed up my PC. Still holding off on playing The Witcher 3 dlc for that reason. If a company treats its customers properly and provides a fair price people will buy the products. A good product always sells. This issue with piracy has been blown up for years because there is a large portion of the population that doesn't have enough money to buy loads of games, so they pirate them. Those people wouldn't have purchased the games anyway. It's not talking things straight, but piracy does not always equal a lost sale, something that publishers do love to make it look like.

There's been a major expansion in PC gaming since the Witcher 3 was released? Market share of PC gaming among the platforms was 28 percent in 2015 and is 25% in 2019.But most of the change is related to increases in mobile gaming.

The only measure will be that PC gamers won't be able to play the game before the street date. Other than that, ahoy matey!

Pirated? I`ve never seen or heard of someone who attacked a ship to get a copy of a game!

you know nothing, John Snow is it ? most likely!


Witcher 3 had no DRM and was actually an example that "great" games don't need DRM to be successful.

Even nasty little pirate such as myself, bought the game, when I could pirate it in an instant.

So yeah, don't worry little lad, everything will be fine and dandy!

Like every other game out there? lol

When GTA 5 was released, i've read that some unfortunate lad was hit by a brick to the head by hooligans - they wanted to get his just-bought copy of the game. It happened in England, iirc.

It didn't happen on a ship, but still... :P

I have yet to see a pirate who said "oh, the drm on this game is so strong, it will take cracker groups a month to crack, so I just buy it, so I can play day 1 instead of waiting a month for it to be available on pirate sites".

On the other hand I have seen people pirating games because of the insanely restrictive drm a legit copy has come with. Some of these people still ended up buying a legit copy, but they just played the pirated version because it was more comfortable.

So: yes, the game will be pirated like crazy. And most of these people would have never bought the game anyways, so these shouldn't be count as "lost sales". It's a false assumption that every pirated copy is a lost sale, because many pirates never buy games ever no matter what. And if they can't pirate one game, they just pirate another and play that.
A notorious piarte acquaintance of mine actually called me "insane" multiple times for spending money on games. He says he can spend that money elsewhere, so why spend it on something he can get for free. Absolutely nothing ever could convince him to spend a cent on games.

On the other hand there are many people who buy games. The Witcher 3 also sold a lot of copies, so why not Cyberpunk?

Plus I know of people who actually stopped pirating (or pirated a lot less) after they discovered DRMfree games.

True. Most piracy I do these days is games I actually own on Steam or Origin just to get rid of that of the obnoxious client dependance and DRM.

And yes. Cyberpunk will be pirated nearly instantly after release. As all games are.

^This. Especially a few people I introduced to GOG went all legal after many years of "external backup copies". Some even started buying on Steam... because they couldn't get ie. Deus Ex HR on GOG and had gotten used to actually pay for games... So the industry should give GOG a medal, really...

The Witcher 3 DID have DRM if you bought the disc. Wasn't allowed to install it without Galaxy and wasn't allowed to play it without a day one patch. How very Steam of GOG.

Of course the game will get pirated. People don't value games as much as they use to. It's all just throw away digital junk.

We don't really know the numbers on this. I'd guess quite a few would eventually buy the game if it was something they were really interested in and it somehow remained unavailable on torrent sites for a very long time. That general concept is why preventing day one piracy is the goal of most DRM. What kind of a percentage of pirates are we talking about though? Impossible to say really. Also the worse DRM you use, the more sales you lose to people annoyed by it, so it evens out to some degree.

There's really no super easy answers with piracy questions like this, but that's human nature for you. In general though as said by others, Witcher 3 did juuuuuust fine, so I'm not too worried about Cyberpunk.