The Witness Is Getting Pirated To Hell And Back

If it wasn’t for the latest Naruto game, I’d be playing The Witness right now. Even then, that hasn’t stopped me from absorbing a good deal of coverage and footage of Jonathan Blow’s latest non-linear puzzler.

To my addled brain, it looks like a mash-up of Myst and Heaven & Earth. It’s astonishingly satisfying, according to Stephen’s review. Mark is loving it so far. And so are players on PC. But that hasn’t stopped the vast majority from pirating the game.

The Braid creator has been tweeting rapidly early this morning letting people know just how rabid the rates of piracy are on PC, going as far to say that The Witness was “the #1 game on a certain popular torrent site”.


Part of the reason for The Witness’s high rates of piracy could be Blow’s decision not to include DRM. “I don’t like DRM because I think people should have the freedom to own things,” he said in a Twitter reply. One suggestion was to introduce DRM for a short period of time, with Blow musing on having The Witness DRM-locked for 4 months.

Blow added that Braid was also heavily pirated on PC, with a piracy rate of “probably 90%”. He didn’t provide any attribution or verification for that figure, however.


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