Crysis Developer Moving Away from PC Exclusives; Cites Piracy as 'Core Problem of PC Gaming'

163
Crysis and Far Cry creator Crytek has revealed its intent to focus more on consoles and move away from creating PC-exclusive titles due to the "huge piracy" problems of the platform.

"We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore," Crytek president Cevat Yerli told PC Play. "Similar games [to Crysis] on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won't have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future."

The studio had previously revealed it was working on at least one console title and a non-FPS game along with the still-underway efforts to bring its CryENGINE 2 technology to consoles.

The Crytek president noted that piracy had significantly hurt the retail performance of Crysis, the company's CryENGINE 2-powered PC-exclusive sci-fi shooter that arrived last fall and went on to sell over a million copies worldwide.

"We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis," he continued. "We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable."

Yerli went on to state his belief that piracy is "the core problem of PC gaming...to the degree that pirate games inherently destroy the platform." His comments are similar in tone to those made by many other PC developers, including id, Epic and Infinity Ward.

Chris Faylor was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    April 30, 2008 7:37 AM

    Booo piracy. Make games that people want to pay for.

    • reply
      April 30, 2008 7:38 AM

      I think this is a situation where people wanted to pay for the game, just not for the upgrades to play the game well.

      I mean, sure, the game scales, but playing Crysis with shitty graphical settings is pointless.

      • reply
        April 30, 2008 7:40 AM

        it's not as easy to pirate hardware!

      • reply
        April 30, 2008 7:41 AM

        Crysis wasn't that great of a game. CryTech is an awesome engine, but I had a fairly new computer and it wouldn't handle high settings. On medium or less it was just another FPS, and that's not going to move units.

        • reply
          April 30, 2008 7:46 AM

          I liked the game quite a bit, I just hate not being able to play at maximum detail.

          • reply
            April 30, 2008 8:24 AM

            Yeah I enjoyed the demo but I want the full experience when I play through the game. I can't get the full experience right now so I'm gonna wait a good long while.

Hello, Meet Lola