A lot of people are playing the The Witness, but they’re not all paying for the privilege.
Celebrated indie developer Jonathan Blow took to Twitter to point out that his new PlayStation 4 and PC first-person puzzler is currently the most popular game on a “certain popular Torrent site.” Unfortunately, piracy is pretty rife with games, especially on PC, and it seems Blow didn’t have time to create a fake version of The Witness to distract from the real thing — as other developers have done in the past and Blow himself did on his previous game Braid.
Blow said that he’s happy lots of people are playing and enjoying the game, but he also warned that he won’t be able to build another similar project without sufficient sales.
Some followers pointed out that The Witness’ $40 price might be the reason for so much piracy, but Blow was quick to dismiss that by sharing that Braid — a $10 game — also had similar problems. Interestingly, the highly acclaimed $5 mobile game Monument Valley also had massive piracy issues — with
only 5 percent of Android players paying and most of the rest playing illegally — showing how price really isn’t the main problem.
Blow said he might reluctantly think about adding digital rights management(DRM) to any future game to help combat the issue of piracy. “I don’t like DRM because I think people should have the freedom to own things they bought,” he said. “But I also want to design video games.”
One way to frustrate potential pirates is to fill torrent sites with deliberately incomplete or broken versions of a game — it’s actually something that Blow did with Braid, apparently, but he was too busy this time around to replicate the idea.
Blow also had a quick message for players who are finding The Witness too tough, and that’s to take a break instead of looking for easy answers on the Internet. “I see a lot of people going to forums immediately if they can’t figure something out,” he said. “Don’t do that! It makes the experience a lot worse. You are smart; you can do it! If you don’t know now, sleep on it. Take a walk. Watch a good movie, or go to a different puzzle!”
