I just red this at the german Gamestar. The first Retail-Versions of The Witcher 3 for the PC will require that you download a small data to make it possible the game starts. This is not the Day-One-Patch and you are free to let the installation do it automatically or you can download it manually at any time you want. CD Projekt want to secure the game from being published too early and is stating this is no DRM.

I'm very surprised about this. Because I see DRM as leaving any non necessary connection to the internet just for playing. I can understand CD Projekts point but this is a hard grey point about that issue. I hope they will at least mark very loud on the boxes which version needs that and that you now get an older version with the necessary missing data included.

What do you think?

Is this to unlock a preloaded Witcher 3?

"The initial, pre-premiere retail PC batch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt needs to download a file from our servers to allow play. This file will either be downloaded automatically during installation process or you can choose to download it manually from a dedicated website. Since we have no DRM in the game, this is a security measure we needed to incorporate so the game doesn’t leak during the production process. No worries, the file will not be big. Copies of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt produced after launch will not contain this security feature."

I guess they want to prevent review code copies from being uploaded early on the internet.

No. This is to make the usual pc retail version even start, if it is the first released version.

I think if they didn't do it, game would be on torrent sites before actual release date..

Essentially, yes. It's for retail versions that ship before the release date. If they just sent them to stores, people would play them before the release date; this, as it says quite clearly, will stop the game from starting until the patch is downloaded on the release day, which will then allow the game to start.

But why?

Why is 'people potentially playing this a few days early' a problem that now needs solving this way, given that it hasn't been seen as a problem before? What's the harm - in business terms?

[And yes, I'd rank that as a form of digital rights management. Even if it's only an initial batch it still will mean that those that happen to have bought the initial batch will rely on that file staying available and downloadable in the indefinite future. Unless they can exchange their installation disks against another batch of installation disks without much hassle after the release date this potentially locks them out.]

Does the retail version include a GoG code? If it does, then this precaution is annoying but not a deal-breaker. Oh well. This might matter more to me if I still bought physical copies.

It does. It's necessary for patches and the DLC packs.

What I think is that people misunderstand the way pre-downloads work from technological perspective. Before, you would wait until a game is officially released, buy it and then download it and play it and you would have to wait for as long as it took to download the game over your Internet connection until you could play it. If your connection was slow or quirky it might take hours or even days before you could play it. One thing is certain though, and that is that you could not download it ahead of time to be able to play it the split second that the game was officially released.

Then they started offering pre-orders where you pay for a game up front, and then you still have to wait until it is released in order to play it, and also to wait to be able to download it. More or less the same as I describe above only you are paying for it in advance also.

Many gamers want to be able to buy a game in advance but not have to wait for hours or days to download it in order to be able to actually play the game on release day. They want to be able to buy it now, and then the split second it is released to be able to play it right away.

If you let people download your game in advance in a playable form then they'll be able to also play it before it is released and thus you're basically releasing the game before you're releasing the game. In other words, if you let people download the game early you're not really - you're just releasing the game sooner than you were previously going to and they can play it as soon as they download it.

So, how does a company implement this reality technologically?:

1) Allow customers who pre-purchase game to download the bulk of the game's data ahead of time in a manner that is not playable until the day it is officially released.

2) Provide a technological manner in which to enable the game to be activated and usable on the official day and time that it is officially released.

The only way to do this really is to provide the customer with the bulk of the data, but without providing them with ALL of the data. In other words they are going to be pre-downloading the largest part of the bulk data the game requires but they will not be downloading an immediately fully functioning game - just part of it. Then on release day you flag the servers to allow them to download the remainder of it and they end up with a fully functioning copy of the game.

This is not a form of DRM, it is a form of release data flow management. Similar techniques are used in the open source community by various Linux distributions to be able to provide the various mirror sites access to be able to download a copy of the software to have on their servers in advance so that on the day the release goes public, the mirror servers already have a copy, but they do not want the release to be leaked to the public in advance in case there are last minute screwups detected which they need to put the brakes on, fix and remaster the final product before it goes public.

One way of doing that for example was to provide the ISO images to mirror sites, but to fill the first 1-5 megabytes of the ISO with zeroes thus making the ISO images technologically useless as that part of the image contains critical information to the operating system on the directory structure and layout of the image. This however allowed the mirror sites to make copies of the bulk of the final data but in a form that was technically unusable as-is until the missing pieces were synchronized over later on. Then, on release day the distribution would put the correct proper ISO images up, and the mirror sites would run a script that would synchronize the old partial images with the new final ones and the software would copy over the final few megabytes that made the images proper. After that, integrity checks would validate that the final images were in fact authentic (MD5 sum or SHA1 sum checks etc.) and then they would open the mirrors up to the general public to download.

This process ensured that the mirror sites would all get the majority of data ahead of time and be able to spread the load on release day when general public availability was open, but at the same time prevented the inadvertent release of images that might need to be recalled due to last minute screwups that invariably happen from time to time. It also solved the problem of the general public and mirrors all fighting to get the data simultaneously from one central server if they didn't pre-farm the data out to mirrors in advance.

What the gaming industry is doing with pre-downloads of pre-purchased games is simply another form of this technological process only instead of using ISO images with the first N bytes zeroed out, they're using some other technique that achieves the exact same ultimate purpose - to allow people to be able to download the bulk of the data ahead of time but not actually be able to use it for anything until the product is officially released. The end result is that it benefits the consumer to be able to download their game in advance instead of struggling to download it from ultra-busy servers on release day - WIN, it benefits the game distributor by their servers being able to distribute the majority of data to customers in advance days/weeks ahead of time and just sync the final data bits on release day, thus making the release day load on their servers far far lower than it would be the old way of doing things - WIN, it benefits the game publisher/developer because their users can play their games sooner and with a better download experience that is less likely to be fraught with problems from overloaded servers and angry customers, and without having to pre-leak immediately playable versions of their games to be able to accomplish this - WIN.

The entire process is an optimization of release management that benefits everyone across the board with no harmful consequences. Some people out there who are never happy about anything and constantly try to find some way to look at everything in life in a negative manner as "evil corporations try to step on the little man" conspiracy theories will of course never be happy, and will try to paint something like this as a form of DRM because that furthers their negative agenda. Some people can never be happy about anything of course, and that is their prerogative. Fortunately nobody has a gun to their heads forcing them to part with their money, so they can choose their own fate however.

That's what I think. :)

In business terms, many people are absolute nuts about being "teh firstest" to pay or watch anything. As such, if there's a leak, they'll download it without an explicit intention to avoid paying money, just because it's only available for free. And TW3 having no DRM, they wouldn't be incentivized to follow up on their intention to pay anything later. You CAN compete with free, but not until the game is actually RELEASED.

On the other hand, postponing the retail release to secure the game data will piss off retailers. And no one wants to piss off retailers, even in 2015. It's not DRM if you can download the file and then keep it forever, on your personal storage or in the public cloud.

+1 for a first-rate explanation.

Heartily seconded! Well done skeletonbow! :-)

True, true. But I still feel like there's something dodgy about shipping a deliberately non-functional version. When you're claiming your retail game is DRM-free, I feel like the contents of the disc should be able to stand alone.

Comedy gold. but I guess it's not steamworks, so it's not DRM, right? RIGHT?