Bohemia Interactive, developer of the military simulator Arma 2, has revealed some statistics shedding light on the extent to which the game has been pirated.

Speaking with PC Gamer, Bohemia CEO Marek ŠpanÄ›l said, “Our statistics from multiplayer show that for every three legitimate buyers playing their game in multiplayer, there are 100 (failed) attempts to play with a pirated version.”

“This indicates that piracy is an extremely widespread problem on PC, and it's also really worrying for us as a mid-sized, independent, PC-oriented developer.

“We do not have any such data for singleplayer, but I'm afraid there the ratio of pirates to legitimate gamers is undoubtedly much worse.”

Bohemia takes an atypical approach to Digital Rights Management. Believing that traditional DRM ultimately hurts legitimate users, the company usually removes DRM “not too long” after a game's release.

Instead, the company attempts to “degrade” the pirated experience.

“Some of the symptoms are funny, usually annoying,” explained ŠpanÄ›l. “In the Arma series, players with pirated copies have lower accuracy with automatic weapons in both singleplayer and multiplayer, and occasionally turn into a bird with the words, 'Good birds do not fly away from this game, you have only yourself to blame.'

“While we know we will never stop piracy, we use this as a way to make our stand that piracy is not right, that it has a serious negative impact on PC games developers.”

Arma 2 was released in 2009. Bohemia Interactive is currently working on a PC-exclusive instalment in the series, due next year.