Our statistics from multiplayer show that for every three legitimate buyers playing their game in multiplayer, there are 100 (failed) attempts to play with a pirated version, Bohemia CEO Marek paněl told PC Gamer.
This indicates that piracy is an extremely widespread problem on PC, and its also really worrying for us as a mid-sized, independent, PC-oriented developer. We do not have any such data for single-player, but Im afraid there the ratio of pirates to legitimate gamers is undoubtedly much worse, he added.
Its very difficult. Companies and teams invest a lot into game development, and with such widespread piracy, its extremely tough to get the investment back.
Bohemia has gained an element of notoriety for its use of a DRM system called DEGARDE (formerly known as FADE), which introduces bugs to pirated copies of the game.
The motto is: Pirated games are not worth playing, original games do not degrade. Some of the symptoms are funny, usually annoying, paněl explained.
In the Arma series, players with pirated copies have lower accuracy with automatic weapons in both single player and multiplayer, and occasionally turn into a bird with the words Good birds do not fly away from this game, you have only yourself to blame While we know we will never stop piracy, we use this as a way to make our stand that piracy is not right, that it has a serious negative impact on PC games developers.
paněl described DEGRADE as a supplement to more common DRM systems like always-on and online registrations, which are often required by publishers before theyll sign off on a PC game.
