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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
I know for a fast that when i could grab even a "decent" title for $20-$30 i bought more games,now I'm not willing to fork out $50-$60 for something that MAY be worth my time. though i have given up piracy and just lowered my purchases over all.
Also are there any numbers on how many of the pirates are from areas where a game may not be available, either due to legal issues (anti -hate laws in germany) or import problems such as excessive tariffs or political import bans?
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The average price of a PC game has decreased by $10 over the last five years (not taking inflation into account), while the average price of a console game has increased by $10 over the same period.
That's right...MOST PC games sell for $40 nowadays. The ones that sell for $50 are generally the big budget "AAA" titles.
There is a side problem with dropping the price, and that is the smaller the overall price differential, the harder it is for lower-budget titles to compete. Right now on shelves I can look at the $20 shelf and see games that are pretty much worth the $20. If we drop the $50 ceiling down to $30, those $20 games are no longer saying, "We're 40% of these other guys," their price says that they are worth 66% of the other game. They have to drop their price because of the price ceiling to get to where they are in a proper "rank" for their game.
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