CD Projekt RED’s upcoming massive open-world release, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, is set to be free from any forms of digital rights management (DRM) issues from the get go, the developer has confirmed.
It was not long ago when Namco Bandai announced that they would be in charge of distributing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in Europe, which, in turn, caused a few to believe that the game will arrive with all kinds of DRM-related issues. However, all those fears have now been quashed by the company itself.
Publishing an open letter on the matter, Marcin Iwinski, Co-founder and Joint CEO at CD Projekt RED, acknowledged that following the recent announcement of the distribution deals for The Witcher 3 in North America and Europe, “there have been some concerns regarding DRM and previous legal issues with The Witcher 2” that the company would now like to stop.
“I’d like to say it loud and clear: The PC version of The Witcher 3 will have absolutely no DRM from day 0. Zero. Zip. Nada. It doesn’t matter if you choose to buy it on GOG.com and support us directly or buy the game in box format, you’ll still get the 100% DRM-free experience. And this goes for the whole world,” he added.
Iwinski also stated that the company has “fiddled with DRM in the past (Oh boy! How young and naïve we were;) and that’s enough. Lesson learned.”
In fact, back in May last year, GOG.com’s Managing Director, Guillaume Rambourg confirmed that CD Projekt Red was no longer using DRM, and that the GOG.com downloader used to download games sold via CD Projekt’s digital channel did not monitor usage or report back to an authentication or verification system.
“We use no DRM and we never will. The fact that we have a download assistant has worried a few people because they’re afraid it’s the first step on the way to having an always-on client like some other distributors out there. We’ll never do that,” he told Forbes in an interview.
“Our download assistant has a very limited scope of information that it accesses. It knows your account login information, which it obviously needs that so it can download your games and let you know about any game updates or forum replies. It keeps track of the progress of your downloads. It checks individual “chunks” often during the download to make sure that the file you’re saving is not corrupted. And that’s it. There’s no authentication server.”
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, set for an arrival in the spring of 2014, is said to have a setting which is more than "30 times larger" than previous Witcher games. It was confirmed previously that the game won’t be featuring a multiplayer mode.
