Fred_DM: you are right, of course.
but The Witcher 2 doesn't necessarily help to argue against DRM from a business point of view. first of all, the game got pirated 4 times for every copy sold. and apparently, that's supposed to be a success... some 1.25 million copies were sold. out of those, only 200'000 were DRM-free. so the vast majority of TW2 sales came from physical copies and Steam, both of which contained SecuROM DRM. at the time of release nobody knew it would be patched out weeks later.
to me this shows that DRM-free isn't much of a factor when it comes to sales. at the very least, publishers and investors will see it that way and you can't really blame them.
Perhaps.
Much depends on what typical piracy rates are for that genre/size of game (which I freely admit I have no idea), what expected selling rates are in each distribution channel by size of channel, why people chose a particular distribution channel, how retail sold after CD Projekt announced it went DRM-free versus how it is expected to sell that many weeks after release, etc ... These are all things that would need to go into the analysis and sadly I, and I suspect no one for some of it, has access to all of it (some of the data surely is known by someone somewhere, but not all of it I suspect - particularly choice of distribution channel, one would need a scientifically conducted survey). Essentially we need a RAND/Pew/GAO/CBO-like organization (organizations with reputations for solid statistical analysis) or an academic group to do a real, thorough study examining all the factors financed by the government. Frankly this and other issues related to piracy are going to be increasingly important to the 21st century economy (as shown by PIPA/SOPA/ACTA/etc ...) and there is frighteningly little actually studied thoroughly and dispassionately about piracy, DRM, and the effect on the economy and the industries in question.
Music is actually a great example, since going DRM-free digital music has never been bigger and in fact iTunes is now the world's largest music seller in every metric. Now digital music was on the rise anyway, how fast (and maybe it would've gone faster) it would've risen in prominence if it had remained restricted by DRM should be studied. Now obviously that is a different market from the video game market by virtue of being different media. Further I can't say that it wouldn't be bigger (or smaller) if DRM were still in place, but I think it does point to the fact that it is possible to have a very successful, huge digital marketplace without DRM.
