A little over a week after its release, The Witcher 2 is getting its first patch, and with it all versions of the game will now be DRM free.

Though the game was initially slated to be DRM free from the beginning, when it was released the only version of The Witcher 2 without any form of copy protection was the one sold on Good Old Games. With version 1.1, however, it will be removed from every version of the game. The main reason for the decision to remove the DRM seems to be that the copy protection was causing performance issues for many users.

"Our approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version," explained development director Adam Badowski. "This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services. So, we felt keeping the DRM would mainly hurt our legitimate users. This is completely in line with what we said before the release of The Witcher 2. We felt DRM was necessary to prevent the game being pirated and leaked before release.

"This purpose has been served, so we are pleased to let our users enjoy the full freedom of game usage they deserve."

The patch also reportedly improves the game's framerate by up to 30 percent and it includes the first free DLC called "Troll Trouble." Though it was just released, developer CD Projekt has already run into issues with the patch on Steam, where it's a rather sizeable download, reportedly coming in at over 9GB for some users. This issue is expected to be fixed by Monday.