Shadow Warrior 2 is a pretty good game. With its rich weapons system, random level generation and over-the-top-action, the game currently enjoys an average metacritic review score of 81 from critics and 9.2 from users. But gameplay is not the only thing developer Flying Wild Hog got right as a lot of gamers are praising the fact that the game shipped with absolutely no DRM copy protection.
When they decided to ditch copy protection Flying Wild Hog knew that they would lose some sales to piracy, but the studio reasoned that the extra sales were not worth making the game worse for paying customers who'd no doubt be affected by the instability and performance degradation typically associated with the use of anti-piracy DRM tools.
"We don't support piracy, but currently there isn't a good way to stop it without hurting our customers," Flying Wild Hog developer Krzysztof Narkowicz explained on the game's section in Steam Community. "Denuvo means we would have to spend money for making a worse version for our legit customers. It's like this FBI warning screen on legit movies."
Modern DRM solutions actually have deeper impact than affecting the game's stability and performance. The current most powerful DRM solution, Denuvo, was able to achieve that status only by merging its code directly into the game's core logic. This means that the game developers have to spend time writing DRM-related code in their game's code and quality control have to test it rigorously. Flying Wild Hog believes that all this time and effort is better off being spent making the game better.
"Any DRM we would have needs to be implemented and tested," explained Narkowicz in an unrelated interview. "We prefer to spend resources on making our game the best possible in terms of quality, rather than spending time and money on putting some protection that will not work anyway."
"The trade-off is clear," said a Flying Wild Hog spokesman. "We might sell a little less, but hey, that’s the way the cookie crumbles!"