The Witcher 2 Pirated over 4.5 Million times

The Witcher 2 has been illegally download at least 4.5 million times, developer CD Projekt has estimated.

In an interview with PCGamer, CEO Marcin Iwinski explained that it was impossible to be exact, but added that his estimation was most likely lower than the actual number

“I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first six to eight weeks there was around 20-30k people downloading it at the same time.

Let’s take 20k as the average and let’s take six weeks. The game is 14GB, so let’s assume that on an average not-too-fast connection it will be six hours of download. Six weeks is 56 days, which equals to 1344 hours; and with six hours of average download time to get the game it would give us 224 downloads, then let’s multiply it by 20k simultaneous downloaders.

The result is roughly 4.5 million illegal downloads. This is only an estimation, and I would say that’s rather on the optimistic side of things; as of today we have sold over one million legal copies, so having only 4.5-5 illegal copies for each legal one would be not a bad ratio. The reality is probably way worse.”

That’s some serious calculations there for working out piracy, and the sad thing is that the real number is probably a lot higher.

Iwinski said that “DRM does not work” with the reasoning that “however you would protect it, it will be cracked in no time.”

Source: PCGamer