What you maybe think of is something like the piracy anmesty sale of Machinarium that took place in August and sold 20000 copies within 2 weeks at roughly 5$ per copy. I also bought it and even did not pirate it before.

The difference to your model. The cheap price was for everybody, not only pirates. If you make it a pirates only discount, then its an incentive to pirate.

If the discount is for everybody, then its only a sale. You effectively propose to have a sale and lower the price until pirates are buying the game. I guess 5$ will not be enough for it and more importantly: the point of highest profit is not equal to the point of highest sales numbers, at least the economy textbooks say so, so you cannot lower price until everybody buys. There must always be some people who cannnot buy... potential pirates.

However, also what you say is maximizing sales by adjusting prices on the financial resources of the customers. This is usually done by offering different versions.

What we could do is offer a premium, luxury version of TW2 including Geralts silky underwear and an apple for customers who just have too much money, the premium version for all normal customers and the basic, pirate version for 10$ and with only half the gameplay for poor people.

But then pirates also want the full content.... All in all I conclude that a little threat to the pirates while not hurting the buyer is an acceptable way.

Actually this way it's more convenient to CDProject if someone pirate the game and get caught.
Let say 10 people buy the game for 40 dollar. 10x40 = 400
Let say 10 people buy the game for 40 dollar and one, that would never buy the game anyway, pirate it. If he is caught he will pay something that is at least 100x wha he shoudl have paid. Really convenient for them, no loss or a major income. It's difficutl to say that the pirate is the thief here.
Also there's inconsistency between the drm-free philosopy (don't harass the customer, concentrate only on the customer and not on a never been sales, ect.) and this move.

Piracy won't lessen the income, people will buy if they wanted to buy in the first place, move like this will only make them less prone to the purchase.
This move won't lessen the piracy and won't increse the income in the normal way. It's only a move to get income from something that it would never be a purchase, nor a potential loss to them. It's really too convenient.

This move suggest low confidency in the work they have done, at least enough to say :"our game is not good enough, we must get the money in another way". And if the developer doesn't trust its own work, well people will think twice before buying it.

I really don't think all pirates are so poor that they cannot buy a single video game. If they would live in central africa somewhere ... okay, but everywhere else... this argument is just ridiculous.

With all the releases coming out each year it's likely that many pirates download everything that sounds even vaguely interesting but then only buy a small number of games (depending on their budget)--which ones to buy would be determined by how well they enjoyed the "demo". If piracy wasn't an option some might actually buy fewer games overall to avoid wasting money on a lousy game (actual demos are rare these days).

Releasing a demo could certainly help cut down on "demo" downloads and the casually curious, but most recent games have demos long after the release date (by which time the pirates have done their own demos anyway) or never at all.

I agree with everything you said. It's really tough trying to decide between two or three games on a tight budget, even with a demo. Plus demos can be quite large and may not be an accurate representation of the full game. If somebody have access to both, might as well use the better 'demo'. As long as they pay for games they like, it's fine by me!

I'm still waiting for cdProjekt to tell me they won't do those mafia actions.

Again, I will not buy this game if they confirm they will...