According to CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwinski, optimistic estimations suggest that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings has been illegally downloaded at least 4.5 million times.
“I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first 6-8 weeks there was around 20-30k people downloading it at the same time,” he said. “Let’s take 20k as the average and let’s take 6 weeks. The game is 14GB, so let’s assume that on an average not-too-fast connection it will be 6 hours of download. 6 weeks is 56 days, which equals to 1344 hours; and with 6h 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 1M 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.”
Despite this, Iwinski is still against DRM and believes in rewarding purchases rather than punishing anybody, which is pretty damn rad. It’s just a shame when games that treat customers well are still ripped off like crazy. One day I hope that pirates can at least act a little classier.
The Witcher 2 pirated 4.5 million times [Videogamer]
