Hopefully those people who illegally downloaded the game will eventually buy the game.

What devs should understand is that there's a lot of people who would make everything to buy a game like this, even if they don't work and/or live in poor condition and in overinflated countries. In absence of a playable demo, piracy is the only way to test the game on your machine before making an important purchase.
I always say that there are more ethical pirates than ethical customers in the world.

Last but not least, if you put DRM you're raising a wall between the game and the player. In these terms i hate Steam, when you buy a game it's not your game but it's steam game and you'll always need to be linked to them.

I pirated TW1. That's how I got hooked into this series. I bought it only after TW2 after I found GOG.

He bought the game right? :D In my book he is cool :) Besides, why there are no demo versions so that PC gamers can check if the game is interesting and if their setup is powerful enough to run the game at acceptable quality?

For what it's worth, all versions of the game should be essentially the same. Not sure if the Steam version has any significant differences.

To everyone playing a pirated copy: do consider supporting the devs, if you enjoy the game. If you can't afford buying a full price copy, buy one in the future if you can, once it's offered at a discount.
Yeah, that's a shame, about the lack of a demo or benchmark; I would have liked one as well. But at least now that the game is out, it has been tested on many different graphics cards and hardware configs, and with a little research you can get a good idea how the game is going to run on your system.

How do you make a demo for a game over 20GB?

Well, if OP had written this post on the Steam community, he'd have been perma-banned in less than 24 hours.

Personally, I think this is a totally legitimate question. I don't know the answer, though.
Well, White Orchard (the prologue area) would've been a perfect contender for the demo, together with Kaer Morhen (the tutorial level).

Sure,but your looking at maybe a couple of gig Dl.And people will say that's too big:-)

Not sure what your point is -- obviously a demo would, at the most, only include a fraction of the full game content ( in particular of the voice acting, music files, cut scenes etc. ) and thus be much smaller.

If it's mostly intended as a technical benchmark, there would have been no need for actual gameplay at all. Just a scripted "on-rails" camera sequence, through some village or across a battlefield, with a few effects, changing weather and such thrown in. Would have been enough to test system performance, and play around with the various graphics settings.

It's hard to create a representative gameplay demo for such a long and complex game anyway. ( Maybe that's what you meant. )

Yeah,that's close enough.

Give me a freaking benchmark so that I can see if I can run the damn game with acceptable frame rates. Construct a simple arena level or give me access to a short tutorial level. Anything. I am not addressing CDPR here because they have always provided great quality games. At least in my own opinion. I was crazy enough to pre-order Witcher 3 as soon as it was available to pre-order xD. Just think about other games out there? Tons of bullshots, marketing and telling lies about how it is difficult to create a demo....in the 90s demos were everywhere. Anyone remembers Half-Life Uplink? I do not really care about the size. I bet there is technology present to provide a simple level or at least a benchmark form the engine.

Yes,your right at one stage all games had demos.But you are talking to the wrong people,ask the dev's why they
can't put out any demo's.It all has to do with money.

White Orchard would've been a perfect demo area, so I don't get the argument. In the old days it was the same, the demo would contain the first 5% or so of the game and you usually got them with gaming magazines. Then if you liked the demo, you also got the full version.

These days I don't bother with demos at all, either I pirate for "demo" on my own terms or I buy it straight up after doing research or just trusting the developer enough.

With piracy as spread as it is I don't think all that many people bother with demos really.

I think the reason why there are no demos anymore is because it's not good for sales.

If it was good for sales, then there would be demos out there.

Why is not good for sales, I think it could be due to several reasons.