CD Projekt has generally maintained a stance against DRM systems but - if TorrentFreak is to be believed - this might be only a front to lure in pirates.
CD Projekt's latest game, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, was released originally with a nasty DRM system before the company released a patch that removed that protection, explaining that it was only meant to prevent pre-release leaks.
Further asserting their customer friendly stance, CD Projekt's CEO Marcin Iwinski explained that some DRM solutions might be "hard to crack, but you start messing with the operation system, the game runs much slower and - for a group of legal gamers - it will not run at all. None of these solutions really work, so why not abandon it altogether?"
Marcin Iwinski estimated that around 4.5 million copies of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings were downloaded illegally through BitTorrent alone. For reference, more than one million copies of the game were sold legally.
So far, the company's official stance on piracy and DRM is reasonable, if not commendable. Problem is, according to TorrentFreak, CD Projekt has commissioned a law firm and a torrent monitoring company to track down and identify the game's downloaders then send them hefty cash settlement proposals.
"The price CD Projekt is asking through their lawyers is slightly higher than what gamers have to pay in stores, to say the least," TorrentFreak reported. "Over the past several months thousands of alleged BitTorrent users in Germany were asked to cough up 911,80 euros ($1230) to pay off their apparent debt to the company."
CD Projekt hasn't responded to TorrentFreak's accusations yet.