Shadow Warrior 2 Developers: We'd Rather Spend Our Time Making A Great Game Than Worrying About Piracy

Say That Again

from the good-guys dept

With the time we spend discussing the scourge of DRM that has invaded the video game industry for some time, it can at times be easy to lose sight of those in the industry who understand just how pointless the whole enterprise is. There are indeed those who understand that DRM has only a minimal impact on piracy numbers, yet stands to have a profound impact on legitimate customers, making the whole thing not only pointless, but actively detrimental to the gaming business. Studios like CD Projekt Red, makers of the Witcher series, and Lab Zero Games, makers of the SkullGirls franchise, have come to the realization that focusing on DRM rather than focusing on making great games and connecting with their fans doesn’t make any sense.

And now we can add Polish game studio Flying Wild Hog to the list of developers that get it. The makers of the recently released Shadow Warrior 2 game have indicated that it basically has zero time for DRM for its new game because it’s entirely too busy making great games and engaging with its fans. On the Steam forum, one gamer noticed that SW2 did not come with any embedded DRM, such as Denudo, and asked the studio why it wasn’t worried about piracy. Flying Wild Hog’s Kris Narkowicz replied:

“We don’t support piracy, but currently there isn’t a good way to stop it without hurting our customers. Denuvo means we would have to spend money for making a worse version for our legit customers. It’s like this FBI warning screen on legit movies.”

In a follow-up statement to Kotaku, Kris went even further.

“Any DRM we would have needs to be implemented and tested,” KriS explained to Kotaku. “We prefer to spend resources on making our game the best possible in terms of quality, rather than spending time and money on putting some protection that will not work anyway.”

In other words, the studio could spend time, money, and resources chasing around a white horse in the belief that it was some kind of anti-piracy unicorn, but doing so would be business-stupid. Instead, the studio has chosen to focus on making its game as great as it possibly can while choosing not to implement software within it that might harm that great experience for legitimate customers. Other staff at the studio essentially acknowledged that not including DRM on the game might result in some lost number of sales, but that the cost to the game and legitimate customers made it so that those lost sales didn’t matter as much.

They’re banking on the quality of their game earning them enough money to counteract the lack of money coming in from people who’ll just steal their game. “We also believe that if you make a good game, people will buy it,” they said. “Pirates will pirate the game anyway, and if someone wants to use an unchecked version from an unknown source that’s their choice.”

It’s always refereshing to hear when a game studio chooses to shrug off the understandable anger that must come along with finding that others are pirating its product to instead focus on what the best course of action for the business actually is: making the best product it can. Altruism doesn’t run uniformly through the gaming public, but there are more than enough gamers willing to pay for quality games to make up the difference. It’s not a perfect scenario from an ethics standpoint, but given that the alternative is arguably ethically worse in that it almost always carries with it a negative impact to paying customers, this is as good as it gets.

But does this sort of approach work? Well, you can see for yourself, as Shadow Warrior 2 currently sits atop Steam’s “Top Sellers” chart and sits at the top of GOG’s “Popular” sales tab. Hey, other studios, are you paying attention yet?

Filed Under: drm, piracy, shadow warrior, video games
Companies: flying wild hog