The Polish studio behind The Witcher 2, reckons that their latest title has been pirated fairly heavily.

In a recent interview CD Projekt's Marcin Iwinski stated that they believe that The Witcher 2 has been pirated somewhere in the region of four million times.

He explained: "I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first 6-8 weeks [since the games release] there was around 20-30k people downloading it at the same time. So 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 1 million copies, so having only 4.5-5 illegal copies for each legal one would be not a bad ratio."

Despite these calculations Iwinski still stands by their decision not to use on The Witcher 2 saying it penalises gamers who legitimately buy the game.

He added: "But still, DRM does not work and however you would protect a game, it will be cracked in no time. Plus, the DRM itself is a pain for your legal gamers this group of honest people, who decided that your game was worth the 50 USD or Euro and went and bought it. Why would you want to make their lives more difficult?"

Thanks PC Gamer.

By Ewan Aiton