CD Projekt responds to demanding nearly €1000 from alleged pirates

CD Projekt has not denied sending letters to German gamers demanding nearly €1000 for allegedly pirating role-playing game The Witcher 2.

The company told Eurogamer: "As you know, we aren't huge fans of any sort of DRM here at CD Projekt RED. DRM itself is a pain for legal gamers - the same group of honest people who decided that our game was worth its price, and went and bought it. We don't want to make their lives more difficult by introducing annoying copy protection systems.

"Moreover, we always try to offer high value with our product - for example, enhancing the game with additional collectors' items such as soundtracks, making-of DVDs, books, walkthroughs, etc. We could introduce advanced copy protection systems which, unfortunately, punish legal customers as well. Instead, we decided to give gamers some additional content with each game release, to make their experience complete.

"However," CD Projekt added, "that shouldn't be confused with us giving a green light to piracy. We will never approve of it, since it doesn't only affect us but has a negative impact on the whole game industry.

"We've seen some of the concern online about our efforts to thwart piracy, and we can assure you that we only take legal actions against users who we are 100 per cent sure have downloaded our game illegally."

"Thousands" fit the bill, according to website Torrentfreak, which broke the original story.

Those gamers that CDP was convinced had pirated The Witcher 2 were asked, by a persuasive German law firm, for €911.80 ($1230) to clear their apparent debt.

CD Projekt had warned in November 2010 that letters could be sent to gamers pirating The Witcher 2.

But casting the net so wide has caused problems: some gamers whose IPs were pin-pointed had reportedly never even heard of The Witcher 2.

What's more, CD Projekt has been caught using a similar "shakedown" tactic - a phrase coined recently by a US judge - before.

In 2008, many UK gamers received letters from Davenport Lyons demanding similar cash settlements for Atari game The Witcher 1.