Witcher 3: Wild Hunt takes a stab at DRM with in-game book

The folks over at CD Projekt RED are very much known to be big advocates of anti-DRM practices. This is one of the big reasons why they partnered with GoG as being one of their main distributors, since the they sell their games completely free of any type of DRM restrictions.

DRM or Digital Rights Management, is a way for companies to safeguard their games from piracy. However, these means are usually quite restrictive to the user, oftentimes diminishing the gameplay experience by having the user connect online to authenticate their copy for example.

CDPR filled the world of The Witcher 3 with a ton of in-game books that contain everything from helpful lore, to joke entries, but this one is pure genius. The book itself is called Gottfried's Omni-opening Grimoire, or GOG. You can read the entry below:

The Defensive Regulatory Magicon (or DRM for short) belongs to the above-mentioned group of the longest-lasting, most effective and hardest to break defensive mechanisms. In order to recognize the individual administering it, it makes use of a portal mounted at the entrance of the area it is to defend. This portal passes streams of magical energy through the body of the person entering and can, in the blink of an eye, determine if this person has the corporeal signature (eyeball structure included) of the entitled administrator. As a result, the only unauthorized individuals that can possibly hope to enter are mimics.

DRM thus makes for an extremely effective and near-unbreakable security measure – but you are in luck, for you hold in your hands the key to bypassing it, namely the present tome, Gottfried’s Omni-opening Grimoire, or GOG for short. In the pages to follow you will find innumerable methods for deactivating DRM, or, even better, bypassing it altogether (…)

Amazing!

[Kotaku]