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Crysis Developer Moving Away from PC Exclusives; Cites Piracy as 'Core Problem of PC Gaming'
by Chris Faylor, Apr 30, 2008 7:32am PDTCrysis 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.
Comments
Crytek - Piracy doesn't ruin sales of your game...this is what does:
1. Your audience...especially those that are into FPS's tend to pirate more. If you make a game for them, expect this problem. Why don't they pirate the same type of games for the consoles? Because they take the path of least resistance. It's easier to pirate for PC...for now...soon enough it's going to be the same problem for consoles as they become more like PC's.
2. PC has never sold numbers like consoles. Stop benchmarking your sales against Halo 3.
3. Your games runs smoothly at high detail on like 2% of people's machines. I'm betting 80% of your pirates can't be considered a lost sale, because these are people who would never have purchased the game to begin with. Who wants to spend $50 bucks to "hope" it works on their machine? I'm sorry - the early buzz on Crysis was that it won't run on most hardware...later that was proven when it came out. Don't blame PC piracy on your inability to build a game for current and next gen hardware.
4. Look at WoW, the Sims, Sins of a Solar Empire, anything from ID, etc. These games sold a shit load and I'm sure they were pirated a shit load. Bottom line...make a great game that runs on people's machines and you won't have an issue.
So lets see...you built a game that:
Requires a ridiculous machine to run
Launched a week after COD 4 - WTF were you thinking?
Caters to the hardcore FPS fan base
Wasn't marketed worth shit
Still has bugs and runs like shit nearly 6 months after release
Lets blame the pirates...
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