Like many people, I enjoy companies that think outside the box. Gog made me a customer by saying they won't support DRM. This was a great thing from them, showing that maybe I was supporting a good business decision on their part.
Even though we're very, very opposed to DRM, we don't argue that fact, but there are a few facts that are worth noting. Piracy isn't nearly as devastating as some studies would have you believe. People throwing around numbers in the billions of dollars of lost revenue are making some false equivalencies.
Every copy of a game that is downloaded does not equate to a lost sale. In many cases, torrent trackers display inflated numbers of seeds and downloads. Those scary numbers aren't real, and by letting ourselves be deluded as to the impact of piracy, we don't rationally look at what it really means for the industry and how to go about minimizing it in an effective manner.
Then the other shoe fell. While CD Projekt is saying they won't harm their customers, they are doing something much worse. A copyright shakedown.
“Yes we will track illegal file-sharing hoping people will find the game good enough to actually change their mind and be willing to pay for it,” CD Projekt’s Agnieszka Szostak told us earlier.
Although this initially sounded quite reasonable, away from the spotlight the company followed in the footsteps of so-called copyright trolls, by signing up for a so-called “pay-up-or-else” scheme. CD Projekt hired a law firm and torrent monitoring company to track those who illegally downloaded and shared the game, and has been sending 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. 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.
So CD Projekt is suing innocent bystanders and potential customers because they want an instant payout. Quite frankly, they're acting as if pirates cost them more than making a real game and keeping it updated. It's also downright hypocritical given that they've said they support filesharing. This does not support filesharing. It also does nothing but piss people off as they hear the story.
I will not be putting money into Gog.com no matter how good the games are. Gog has really hurt their message with me. Why support a company that believes that suing innocent bystanders is more important than making games worth buying?
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